Phoenix
by Selective scifi junkie
Summary: First there was nothing. Nothing but a heartbeat, and knowing that she was alive. Five days after X-2, a creature wakes in Alkali Lake, but she does not belong in the water. Details for spoilers and rating (which is a little complicated) inside.
1. Chapter 1

**Phoenix**

 **Summary: First there was nothing. Nothing but a heartbeat, and knowing that she was alive. Five days after X-2, a creature wakes in Alkali Lake, but she does not belong in the water**

 **Spoilers:** **X-1, X-2, arguably Last Stand, but I wrote this before I saw Last Stand, I was just right about a couple of things, but wrong about many more!**

 **Set:** **Original timeline, five days after X-2**

 **Rating and content warnings:** **Broadly speaking, a T. But according to the site rules, there are a couple of chapters that ought to push it up to an M. Those chapters will be clearly marked with Trigger Warnings and what they are trigger warnings for. The plot makes sense without them. If you are concerned, please skip. If you would like a one-line summary, please ask. Barring the problematic chapters, it's not a strong T.**

 **Genre:** **Hurt/comfort/general**

 **Disclaimer:** **I have no claim to the X-men and anticipate no profit from this. Only the original characters and the plot are mine.**

 **PLEASE NOTE: I am spoiler-sensitive to all films made after 2011. I'm trying really hard not to spoil Logan for myself.**

* * *

First there was nothing. Nothing but a heartbeat, and knowing that she was alive. Time was meaningless. She knew that her awareness came and went.

Then there was water. Above her, under her, all around her. She clung to the fact that she was alive. She knew she did not belong in the water, but she could not care.

Then, like a sleeper that suddenly reviles the blanket over its head, she kicked out. She did not know how she knew how to swim, she did not ask. She knew that she needed air, as a newborn animal knows it needs milk, without knowing why. Something inside her sounded 'oxygen', 'aerobic respiration', 'sixteen-fold increased efficiency', but they were barely even words.

Her head broke the surface of the water. She gasped. Power rose inside her. Water surged up out of her so that for a moment, she felt like she was drowning. Then she took a breath. Her body flared in to life. She was cold. She was wet. Her clothes were heavy with water. She looked around. The sky was bright gold in behind her, darker in front. She did not belong in the water.

She kicked out and started to swim for the shore, away from the light. Her muscles began to burn. She kept going. Ghosts of trees began to trail at her legs and belly. She kept going. Air tore in to her body, deeper and deeper with every breath. She could feel more of herself. More of her felt cold. She did not belong in the water. She kept going.

Solid ground caught at her feet. She staggered upright. It was growing darker. East. She was facing east. It was even colder in the air than in the water. Her hands and feet were numb. She staggered forwards, through the shallows. She did not belong in the water. Her hands were bright white, so white they didn't blanch further when she pressed on them. She was shivering. The hairs across her skin were standing upright. Vasoconstriction, thermogenesis, piloerection. Words. Words that described what her body was doing to try to save itself. She wrung out her dripping hair and kept walking. She was so cold.

She heard things moving in the darkness now and then, other creatures in the forest. She kept going. Her fists were balled in her armpits. She stumbled over the dark ground because she couldn't see it. But she kept going. As fiercely as she had known she didn't belong in the water, she knew she didn't belong in this forest.

Something ahead of her started towards her. She stopped. The world was unkind to those like her. She shook her hands out and raised them in front of her. The thing before her was gathering speed. She pushed. She pushed against it as though she'd always known how. The great creature stopped, as suddenly as though it had run headlong in to a wall, and tumbled over itself backwards. She lowered her hands, panting. The bear lumbered away in to the darkness, deciding she wasn't worth the effort. Ursus arctos, a grizzly. She kept going.

The sky in front of her was starting to lighten slightly, she thought, when the ground in front of her changed, from rough, needle-strewn forest, to tarmac running across her path. A road. She shrank back in to the shadow of the trees.

 _"_ _-menace of mutant violence-"_

 _"_ _-enter our minds and take our God given free will-"_

 _"_ _-don't touch me, you freak!"_

 _"_ _Mutie bitch, get out of here!"_

The world was unkind to those like her.

But she was freezing. Wet and shivering at this rate, with no source of food, she wouldn't last another night. Hypothermia. Even if it was warmer during the day, she would not survive for long like this. The road was deserted so far as she could see. She looked left and right along it. One answer was right, the other was wrong. Of this she was certain. She leant back against a tree and closed her eyes. She was so tired.

 _"_ _Oh Phoenix, where are you now?"_

She jumped. She turned to her right as though she'd heard a voice. There was nobody there. But she'd heard a voice. A man's voice, low pitched, slow, English. She knew the voice. She looked slowly around again, then turned right along the road. Phoenix. Now she had a name. If she stayed still, she'd chill and die. She kept going.

* * *

 **Please review. I know I'm ten years too late to be writing in this timeframe, so it'd be nice to know if anyone's reading.**


	2. Chapter 2

It was barely dawn and bitterly cold. Her feet hurt every time she put weight on them. Ischemia. She'd been wet and in the open all night. She had to keep going. The first two vehicles that passed her ignored her wave. The third slowed to a halt just past her. A truck. She walked up towards the cab.

 _"_ _-don't touch me, you freak!"_ She set her jaw and walked up to the door.

A hand reached across and opened it.

 _"_ _The hell did she get out here?"_

"Hey honey, where you going to?"

She looked up at him. He was young, probably only nineteen or twenty, but he didn't worry her.

"East." She said. "East and South."

He raised his eyebrows. "That ain't exactly a place, honey, but does Kamloops suit? Cause that's where this load's headed."

He could picture a map, all the roads numbered. Kamloops was South, there was no way East from here, not by his map anyway. She nodded slowly. "Okay then, hop in."

She clambered in to the cabin. Hands numb with cold, she fumbled with the catch.

"You look frozen." He said, starting to pull away.

She nodded.

"And you soaked, you fall in the lake or something?"

"Something like that." She said. This man was easy to read. He said more or less whatever came in to his head. That was safer. If he attacked her, she'd have warning.

"I'm Jayden." He offered a hand to her.

"Phoenix." She took it. The moment she'd said it, she was sure Phoenix wasn't her name.

"As in Phoenix, Arizona?"

"I guess."

"Whew. You are one long ass way from home."

She nodded. It was warm in here. It was warm and she was so tired.

"Want an oreo?" Jayden gestured to a packet next to him on the seat. She looked up at him. The moment he mentioned food, she realised how hungry she was. "Wasn't a trick question honey." She reached out a white hand, stiff with cold, and took one. Her stomach almost turned at food, but she held it.

"How long until we get to Kamloops?"

"Two hours? Three? Depends on the traffic. I got a truck full of produce to get to Walmart by seven thirty. So I guess you got three hours to decide where you're going past 'East and South'."

It was warm in the cab. Her hands and feet ached and burned as blood came back in to them, her clothes and hair started to dry. The world was unkind to people like her. She could not afford to trust this stranger. But she could not stay awake any longer. She leant back and closed her eyes.

,

"Have you ever had a student," She was standing at a table with a mirror on top of it, taking studs out of her ears. The light was fading outside, but there was a lamp on in the room. There was a bed behind her, to her left was the door, and the man who was speaking. "who, while she's in the classroom, gets a concept, applies it correctly every single time, but the instant it's homework, the instant she's not in the classroom, it all goes out the window?"

She smiled. "You have someone specific in mind?"

"Yes." He sat down on the end of the bed, their bed. "She just… every time it happens, I think I've fixed it this time, then…" He waved a hand. She turned to face him. She felt safe. Safe, calm and contented with this man, who wore sunglasses indoors. "I'm done with it for tonight though. My marking's done, I'm set for tomorrow, I'm done. You?"

"My seniors are revising for Friday's test, so they're not giving me any marking right now, my juniors are complaining so loudly about what you're making them do the I felt bad for giving them any more." She smiled at him.

He smiled back and sat down on the end of the bed. She sat down next to him.

"It's a real shame you didn't stay to the end." He said, the light had changed.

She shrugged. "I gave it an hour, I got bored." She wasn't wearing shoes now.

"I don't get it. How are you able to read those massive stacks of journals that are barely even written in English, but not sit and watch a movie, an action movie."

"The journals make sense, Scott-" He snorted. "They make more sense than that did." She continued. "Meta-things and hallucination bunnies and…" She waved a hand. "It was gibberish."

"Okay." He said, looping an arm around her waist. His sleeves were rolled up past the elbows. "Okay, I get it. The woman I love, one of the most intelligent people I know, does not appreciate the genius of The Wachowskis." She laughed. "And that's okay, because I still love her. And she's very gifted in lots of other ways." He pulled her to him. She relaxed against him. It was pitch black outside. She nestled herself against him. His eyes were closed, they had to be, but he was awake. He felt for her face and kissed her forehead. Their legs were tangled together under the blankets. He smelled faintly of engine grease. He'd washed his hands off pretty well, but the smell still clung to him. He'd spent the last couple of hours of the day with Bobby and John, teaching them basic engine maintenance.

"Goodnight." He said softly

"Goodnight." She replied.

,

Somewhere far away, East by Southeast, a man gasped and woke.

"Jean." His mouth formed the word, but he made no sound. He reached out blindly in the dark and found nothing but space. Awareness started to come back to him, he was waking. He rolled over and his hand found his glasses. Sunglasses in the dark. He reached for the light switch and looked around still gasping. He saw no one. Her link to his mind was slipping. She clawed for it, tried desperately to hold on, but he was too far, and now too… It hit her like a wall of water. He was starting to cry. He pulled his glasses off, eyes closed again, turned the light off, curled in to a ball and wept like a child. For grief. He was grieving, new and raw, he was grieving for her.

"Scott!" She cried out and woke. She was in a truck, with a stranger, who was looking at her now. She turned her head away and bit her hand to hide her tears and steady her breath. She should be with him. She wanted to hold him, comfort him, stop him from crying.

"You okay?" The driver, Jayden, asked. "You want me to stop the truck?"

She shook her head. "Dream."

But it wasn't a dream. Not a normal dream, produced by the twitches of a sleeping brain, something in it had been real. The man, the room… she was as certain of their existence as she was of this cab and the driver. She had a home. She'd seen it. She'd felt it, smelled it. And someone was grieving for her.

He'd called her Jean, not Phoenix. That was her name.

The wall of water. She knew what that felt like, something inside her remembered. Standing in the path of a broken dam, she'd drowned. Surely she'd drowned. She'd expected to drown. But somehow she was alive. She'd swum out of the lake and she was alive.

,

"How long was I asleep?" She asked Jayden.

"Hour? Give or take. I don't figure you slept in the night."

"Don't figure you did either."

"Nah, I was in bed until one, left my girl asleep, came out to do the dawn run."

"So why this job?" She asked.

She let Jayden talk until they pulled up in the parking lot of a massive superstore. There were trucks and people on all sides of them, moving around unloading. Jayden got out.

"You can come if…" She didn't have a better idea. She didn't have a plan at all. She got out of the cab and followed Jayden round. It was colder outside. She balled her fists in her armpits again and stood back while the men talked and signed forms. Jayden and the others started to unload the truck. Pallet after pallet was shifted out and on to forklifts.

What would she do now? She had no money, no means of contacting anyone for help, no way of getting anywhere else… She guessed all she could do was find the main road East from here and try to hitch again. The world was unkind to those like her. What choice did she have? Her people thought she was dead, her lover was grieving for her. She was alone.

Someone moving the pallets slipped. Three apples rolled out across the tarmac. Somebody cursed.

"It don't matter so much, it's only three."

She looked longingly after the apples. She was so hungry.

"Go ahead, Phoenix." She jumped. Jayden was looking at her. "Nobody'll buy ones we've dropped."

,

When Jayden had finished unloading, she walked up to him again. He looked at her thoughtfully.

"I think we need to get you to a hospital."

"I'm fine."

"You got in my truck looking like death, and if you been out all night-"

"I don't have hypothermia. I'm standing and talking to you, I know where I am, and I'm not pale or shivering." Though she was getting cold again. "I don't need a hospital."

He shook his head at her. "The police then. I don't know how you got to be half way between Lac La Hache and 150 mile house at five in the morning all alone with no car, soaking wet, but I'm betting it's not a happy story."

The world was unkind to people like her. "I don't need the police. I just need to get home."

"Do you even know the way home?"

"It's East. East by SouthEast."

"That still ain't a place Phoenix. I just-"

Power welled inside her. "You've been very kind to me, and I'm grateful, really, I am, but the best you can do for me now is to show me where I can hitch a ride East."

His resistance splintered and broke. He nodded. "If you're sure. I'll run you over to the truck stop."

* * *

 **As always, reviews very welcome.**

 **What do you anticipate?**


	3. Chapter 3

The truck stop was busy, at least once a minute, a truck would move. She followed Jayden through the moving maze, there were very few women here. One of the few she could see was wearing red high heels, a long fur coat and a lot of makeup, leaning against the door of a caravan, smoking and talking to a man. Jean was attracting stares. She felt vulnerable here. Being able to hear their thoughts didn't make her feel safer.

Jayden started to approach a knot of men standing around a burning bin.

"Dave, you still cage fighting?"

"When I'm not working. It don't make sense to do it if you can't afford to be banged up for a couple of days. You still betting on it?"

"Most times I stop and I find one. I got a tip for you."

"What?"

"If you ever see a man going by 'Wolverine', don't fight him. Don't bet against him. Bet on him, no matter what he's against."

Jean felt herself frown. Something there was familiar.

"Why? You seen this guy fight? Is he good?"

"I saw him take six men, one right after the other, only a minute or two between. He won every time. Only took him a minute or so for each bout, and those guys didn't walk out of the cage."

"How good were the six he beat? I could probably take six idiots who thought they knew it all because they'd watched Bruce Lee."

"No, this guy is tough. He let some of them get a few really good hits on him, then just got up and beat them. I've never seen anything like it. Some people were saying that he couldn't be... you know, that he had to be freak, to fight like that."

Jean's hackles stood up.

"What, mutant?" The other man said.

"Yeah."

"They shouldn't be allowed." Another man said.

"Hey, fellas." Jayden stepped forward. The group looked at him suspiciously. "Any of you heading east? Just I got this girl-" She had to be ten years Jayden's senior. "-who asked me for a ride, and I'm going back north now."

Jean felt their eyes on her, heard the rippling of their thoughts. _Pretty thing. Nice body._ She felt herself curling inwards slightly, as though she could hide from their stares.

"Yeah, I'm headed east." The man who'd warned the others of the Wolverine said. "Calgary any good for you?" She met his eyes and nodded. His eyes flicked back down, away from her face.

"Don't talk a lot, do you?" She was too busy listening. Picking his thoughts out from the general murmuring was harder. "Can you pay?"

"I don't have any money."

He smiled. She did not like this. He was trying to imagine what she looked like with no clothes on.

"Pretty little thing like you, I can think of a couple of other ways you could pay me." And she could see them, in his mind, what he'd want her to do in exchange for transport. It made her feel sick.

"Hey-" Jayden started.

"Let her answer."

"No." She turned on her heel and walked away, fists balled in her armpits again, breathing hard.

 _Don't follow me._

 _Don't even think about me._

 _You were talking about cage fights._

Unfortunately, it seemed to work on Jayden too.

She went off, round the corner behind the next truck and leant against it. She was so tired. Maybe that had been stupid. Maybe she'd have done better to pretend to be receptive, she knew she had the power to stop him, either by throwing him away with her power as she had the bear last night or by… making it stop in his head somehow. Either way, she'd just thrown away her ride. She bit the inside of her lip and looked up at the sky. She didn't know what to do.

"Hey." She jumped. A man had followed her. She stepped away, turning to face him. He showed her his hands. "I'm not gonna hurt you." She didn't see any reason to disbelieve him. His thoughts were mostly watching her, trying to read her, predict her. She looked at him. Long, untidy hair that was thinning at the temples, a black leather jacket with some sort of motif on one shoulder and faded jeans. "I saw what happened back there." But he hadn't been one of the guys round the bin. He shook his head. "Not nice." She stood still, waiting for him to give her more to go on. "I… I wanted to say I'm going to Calgary too. Well, through it. And… if you can't pay money, that's okay. Doesn't cost me anything to have a hitcher."

Jean drew breath slowly. If he was trying to trick her, he was hiding it well. She couldn't see it. And if it came to it, she should be able to overpower him. "I… thank you. Very much."

He smiled "'S okay. I think my Ma would have my hide if she thought I'd left a lady to find whatever way out of here when I could have helped her."

Jean felt herself smile.

"Go use the restroom in the café there, I'll wait here for you."

She came back to find him puffing on a cigarette. As soon as he saw her, he turned, nodding at her to follow him.

"Come on." He said. "I drop my bonus if I'm stopped more than half an hour." His cab smelt strongly of smoke. It was what she had. The seats were covered in CDs she didn't recognise and old bits of packaging. "Make yourself at home, just shove stuff on to the floor. There's pear drops and mints in there if you like 'em." He gestured to the glove box.

"Thanks."

"No problem. You're DJ. Pick a CD and get going."

Jean looked down at the clutter of cases.

"I… I don't…"

"You don't know these?" She shook her head. He started the engine. "Any of these?" She shook her head. "In Flames? Dark Tranquility? Venom? Slayer..?" He looked aghast at her. "Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, surely…"

"I've heard of those two."

"They're not in here, ah…" He was backing the truck up to turn around. "Skydancer. There's an album called Skydancer by a band called Dark Tranquility, it's blue. This is the start of your education." She started to hunt. She'd do as she was told. She could hear an electric guitar melody in the driver's head.

"I'm Phoenix." She said.

"Nice to meet you Phoenix, I'm Lars."

She'd found the CD by the time they were on the road, and set it playing. The start wasn't promising; a group of men shouting 'Nightfall' as though they were trying to sound like animals. The vocal quality didn't improve. The 'singer' was more screaming than singing, Lars was singing along to the guitar line quietly. Beggars couldn't be choosers. She was tired. She leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes.

'

"Cold." She said, pressing the probe in to the man's bare chest, between his fourth and fifth rib. He shrugged one shoulder.

"I've spent the last ten years in Canada."

She turned the frequency of the probe down slightly, she couldn't see as far as she needed to, there was a lot of muscle in her way, and metal-coated ribs didn't help. The dorsal wall of the man's heart came in to view. He looked up at her screen.

"So that's…"

"Yes, that's your heart."

"Huh." He said softly. "So my heart is in your-"

"No, it's still very firmly behind your ribs." She said, before he could finish. She turned the probe ninety degrees to get the LAAO view.

"Well, I did say it belongs to you."

She drew a breath. "You know, you and I-"

"How's the professor?" Logan's voice was suddenly low and hoarse with disuse. He'd been passed out for days.

"He's good." She said, handing him a couple of tissues to wipe his chest with. No bandages, no scarring, even, from that beating he'd taken in New York last year. "That's all. I'll go back over those and do the math, but you don't need to sit around for that. I'd like a tube of blood though."

"Sure." He offered her his right arm, sitting up.

"Other one." She said. He switched. She put the cuff on him. She didn't need to ask him to pump his fist, he had really good veins and really good blood pressure. He barely reacted when she stuck him. He was a good patient on the whole, other than the intermittent flirting. "Thanks." She pressed a cotton ball to the place she'd taken blood from, then changed her mind. She already couldn't see the mark. "I don't know why I bother doing that with you." He smiled. "You can go."

He got up and reached for his shirt.

"We doing this again?"

"Not unless the Professor or I come up with something else we'd like to know."

"You just seem to like getting me down here on my own with my shirt off."

She shook her head, smiling in spite of herself. "Ultrasound needs direct contact, Logan."

He smiled. "I'm sure it does."

,

"You asleep?"

Jean jerked. A CD case had bounced off her knee.

"You were!" Lars said incredulously. "You fell asleep to Dark Tranquillity. Either you're beyond tired or you have some strange idea about what a lullaby is."

Jean felt herself smile. The electric guitar was still blaring through the speakers, a man's voice was still... singing? Screaming? Growling? "I was up all night."

"Guess that's fair enough then. That's half of the reason I play this stuff. I mean, it's awesome music that cuts to the heart of human nature and makes hard, heartless men feel things, but also it sure as hell keeps you awake."

Jean smiled. "It's… It's not what I'd normally choose to listen to."

Lars smiled back. "You don't look like a metal chick. But seriously, you ever driven through The Selkirk Mountains?"

She shook her head. "No."

"Word of advice? Stay awake if you can. It's just about my favourite place in the world. It's beautiful. Best bit of being a trucker in this part of the world. And today I'm doing it in daylight." She could hear his smile in his voice, even glimpse the images of the red sun showing round the mountains in his mind. "So what's your music?" He asked. She hesitated. "Come on, every soul needs music of some sort, even if it's damn… Ludacris or Spice Girls or whatever other plastic pop they run these days."

Jean hesitated. She did not want to talk about herself. She didn't want to be identifiable. The world was unkind to those like her. But she needed to give him something, she had to be a person in his eyes.

"A… man who was very important to me in my teens used to listen to a lot of classical, Romantic Era classical, so I guess I picked it up from him."

"What, a boyfriend?"

"Oh, no. Gosh no. He was like a father to me."

"Guess that's kind of sweet." He thought classical music was weak, girly. He'd never heard Verdi's Dies Irae.

"How did you get in to this stuff?" She nodded at the CD player

"Melodic metal?" This was melodic? "I've been with it since it was born. It's the Nordic stuff that really defines…"

She let him talk. She didn't like his music, she didn't think any amount of listening to it would change that, but he was easy company, and she still hadn't seen anything in his mind to worry her. He was thinking about the road, the music, the things they passed, hardly about her at all, and that was safer.

The mountains were beautiful once they got in to them, Lars stopped talking about music and started pointing out things:

"That's Albert Peak, right there. Nearly ten thousand feet."

"We're coming in to Rogers Pass now, wasn't discovered until the 1880s, before that, you had to go all the way up to Big Bend." He was something of a tour guide once he got going, talking over his 'melodic' metal music.


	4. Chapter 4

It was over seven hours, by the clock on Lars's dash, before they got to Calgary.

"Right then Phoenix," He said, as he pulled off the freeway. "We got a slight problem. I gotta be in Red Deer pretty soon, so I can't stick around and find a ride for you."

"I'll be okay." She said. He didn't know the half of what she could do.

"Glad to hear it. I'm going to drop you at the truck stop, you'll find someone there who's going… where are you going?"

"East."

"Okay, east."

It was still light when he dropped her off. She had no money and no coat, but she had eaten. She was a lot better off than she had been twelve hours ago. She was so tired, but she didn't dare sleep in the open. She'd probably turn hypothermic. And she needed to keep moving. She needed to get home.

She shook her head slightly. She walked up to a man who was passing.

"Which way are you going?"

"Not interested."

Maybe she'd do better to listen first, to look out for people who were imagining heading east. She stood still, reaching out with her mind. There were a lot of people moving around here. This was going to take a lot of focus.

 _Back home, all the way to Vancouver._

 _Washington for the –_

 _Up to Edmonton in time for –_

 _Place in Denver –_

 _Old City's condemned –_

 _The grain markets in Saskatoon –_

 _All the damn way up to Yellowknife –_

 _Pick up in Red Lake –_

 _To Portland –_

 _Vancouver –_

It was dizzying. She pulled her awareness back in. That wasn't going to work, she'd just give herself a headache. Maybe if she could sleep for twenty minutes she'd find it easier. She was so tired. She didn't want to lose any time. She had to get back. But she was exhausted. There was a diner just over there. She had a few coins over from the note Lars had given her to grab lunch for both of them. Maybe she could doze in there. She'd probably make better use of her power once she had.

She headed in and bought a black tea - the cheapest thing on the menu, she didn't even like tea - and sat down in a far corner. Even if she was surprised, she ought to be able to protect herself. She settled herself back against the seat. She needed to sleep. She closed her eyes.

,

"Do you feel my mind?"

"Yes."

"Good." The man said calmly. "What can you discern from that?"

"That… you're alive, that you're awake." She replied. "That you're a mutant."

"Press on, and tell me what I was listening to before you arrived."

She looked hard in to his eyes. He looked calmly back at her. She was sitting facing him, hands in her lap, his hands were on the arms of his wheelchair. She leant a little harder against his mind. A disordered bundle of thoughts swirled against her. Brains didn't file things neatly. Finding the bit you wanted was always a challenge. But he'd given her a time frame, a very recent one. This was almost like trying to do trauma surgery, where everything was so covered in blood you couldn't see, but you knew what structures felt like, so you had half a chance of finding what you were after. She wanted short term memory. That felt… like that. She saw herself walk in, greet him, sit down. She needed to go back a bit further. The sight of herself rose up again. Wrong thing. She didn't want that. Cautiously, she pushed forward.

"You can use a great deal more force than that, Jean." The Professor said.

"Sorry." She dropped her position. The link between their minds collapsed. "Ah." She folded forwards.

"You were doing well up to that point. You don't need to fear hurting me."

She leant against him again. The same mix of thoughts met her. Short term memory. He was doing very well not to just give her the answer by trying not to give it to her.

A child's voice, high and pure, brushed against her awareness. She reached for it.

"Gently." The Professor said softly.

 _-and fearfulness upon me fall,  
_ _with horror overwhelmed,  
_ _Lord hear me call_

They heard it together, exactly the same sounds in the silence.

 _Lord hear me call  
_ _With horror overwhelmed  
_ _Lord hear me call  
_ _Lord hear me call._

She felt herself smiling. So was the Professor.

"So what was I listening to?"

"Mendelssohn, isn't it. Mendelssohn Wings of a Dove."

"You are thinking of the right piece, but calling it by the wrong name. Wings of a Dove is the next movement. This is Hear my Prayer." An image rose in the Professor's mind. Erik, Magneto, sitting in an armchair, next to a record player, listening to the same piece of music. Always one of his favorites. He loved Mendelssohn, or he had done.

 _How did we come to this?_

Jean pulled back. She didn't think she'd been meant to see that. "Sorry."

"It's no fault of yours, Jean. If two telepaths will practice together, we will see things that perhaps we didn't intend to."

She looked down. She and the Professor had long had a rule that anything they found by reading minds, each other's or anyone else's, went no further. She knew he'd seen things in her mind that she'd have preferred him not to see. She trusted him to keep her secrets, as she kept his.

"Now, you suggest a piece of music to me." Jean frowned. He was perfectly capable of pulling any music he wanted out of her head, in fact, he often complained of picking up other people's ear worms by telepathy. "And I am not going to help you at all."

Jean drew a breath slowly. She leant gently on him. The tangle of thoughts had shifted, but there was still no mistaking one mind for another, not one you knew this well. She called to the surface of her mind a piece of music for the Professor, the arcs of the higher strings, the longer arcs of the choir. She let the music fill her mind and leant on his mind harder.

He smiled. "Mozart's Requiem, Lacrimosa."

She smiled back.

"Now come with me, let's see what we can see." He reached forward and laid his hands on the sides of her head. She did the same to him.

Jean twitched. Water hit her. Blinding force. Blinding cold. She was thrown back. There was no breath in her. She was spinning with the force of the water. She hit the ground and was borne up again. Her chest was full of water.

She gasped. The diner was dark, it was dark outside too. Her tea was cold. The boy at the bar was staring at her. The world was unkind to those like her. She needed to move. She needed to look for someone going East. That was where the man in the wheelchair was, Professor Charles Xavier. The others she'd seen were with him, she knew that without knowing why; her lover, Scott, and the other, the feral one, Logan. She needed to go East. She needed to find them. She got up and stepped out in to the night.

It was much colder out here. There was less movement than there had been earlier. This might actually be easier now. She reached out. Nobody was thinking about moving off, most of the minds she could feel were asleep, or trying to be. She'd missed her window. She was exhausted. She might as well try to get some more sleep. She looked back at the diner. She'd suffer badly with cold if she tried to sleep outside, but she didn't really want to go back in to the diner either. The bar tender had been staring at her. She didn't see many other options.

* * *

 **As always, feedback is very much appreciated**


	5. Chapter 5

The bar tender was staring at her again as she came in. She ignored him and went back to her corner. She drew her knees up, for what little warmth that gave her, and settled her head on her knees.

,

She was walking across the grass, hand in hand with Scott.

"Do you think he'll come?" She asked.

Scott sighed. "I don't know. I don't know how we're going to deal with the fact that his parents don't know he's a mutant."

"Is he refusing to tell them?"

"Yep."

Jean grimaced. "Voluntary power then."

"Yeah. I don't know where we stand legally with this: can we offer him a place and he persuade his parents to let him take it without them ever knowing what this place is?" Scott scuffed a foot through the edge of a raked-up pile of leaves. "What if they want to visit?"

"We can do a pretty good job of hiding. Anonymity is…" She saw Scott smile. "You can plead achromatopsia or something."

"A-what?"

"An eye disease, makes you very sensitive to light, so you have an excuse to wear those even indoors, and it even makes you colour blind, but more colour blind than you are."

"Right."

Jean looked up at the Maple tree. Its leaves were entirely red now, they'd start to fall in a couple of days. She always felt slightly sorry for Scott, not being able to appreciate the change of seasons as fully as she did. "How did he know about us?"

"Very good question." He replied. "That might end up being something we need to worry about."

Jean looked away from Scott, up to the West. The sky was almost cloudless, the sun was down behind the trees and turning half the sky red. It was just starting to be warm enough to want to sit out in the evenings, but things were still flowering like mad. She felt Scott pull gently on her hand.

"Come on." He said. "You were going to tell me all about the meeting with Doctor Macluskey."

She smiled. "So there were six of us there. I think I was the only mutant in the room, but it's kind of hard to be sure, and I was by far the least qualified. Everyone else had PhDs in genetics and stuff, but I'm sort of known for being knowledgeable about mutants, so I got away with it. His point was that he thinks he's found the point mutations responsible, an X-chromosome deletion that produces a stop codon prematurely in… something to do with a DNA reparative protein. I wrote it down." They sat down together in what was left of the sunlight, still hand in hand, both looking away from the sun.

"So if they do find the point mutations…"

"I doubt that one mutation explains all of us, but he's found it in twelve unrelated mutants, so it probably explains a fair few of us. His theory is that it causes proofreading errors in the first trimester, so you get aberrant cell growth that sort of… sets the power up, but nobody's got a convincing theory for why it takes over a decade to be exhibited."

"Doesn't the Professor think it's-"

"Yes, but we'd have a really hard time proving that. The only way to do it would be to give kids with the allele – the gene – massive shots of adrenaline or cortisol or something before they display powers and see if they…"

Scott grimaced. "Yeah, I can see why we haven't done that."

"Exactly." She dropped her shoulders back on to the grass. Scott copied her. She propped herself up on one elbow, facing him. He did the same. "Then a man called Doctor Felger decided to stand up and say that Macluskey was clearly wrong because he had ten phylogeny trees that clearly showed that the Mutant gene isn't X-linked, it's mitochondrial."

"What?"

"That was more or less our reaction."

"Though not for the same reason, probably."

"Well, to put it simply, there are about four reasons that can't possibly be true. We've had a mode of inheritance down for thirty years and it holds. You get the occasional mutant who never displays their powers, but allowing for that, the model works perfectly. Mutant women always produce mutant sons, but not always mutant daughters, and mutant men can produce mutant daughters with non-mutant women, so there is just no way that-" He was looking at her, a smile curling the corners of his mouth. "What?"

"It just… I like it when you do that, just go off about it." He shifted. "Because you're smart. And because you care."

Jean shifted and woke. At the edge of her awareness, East by Southeast, a man, Scott, rolled over and woke. He started to reach for empty space beside him, but stopped himself.

 _She's dead._

It settled on him like a lead weight in his chest.

 _She's dead._

He drew his knees in to his chest, breathing hard. He was on his own. No one would see if he cried.

She pushed out towards him. She had to reach him, had to show him she was alive, but it was futile. He was just too far. As soon as she leant on the connection, it disintegrated and she was alone in the dark. She buried her head in her hands, the backs of her eyes stung. She was exhausted. She had to get home.

The clock on the wall said three AM. She took a couple of deep breaths to steady herself, then reached out.

 _-back to sleep. I've got to make for Winnipeg in two hours._

One consciousness sounded above the general murmuring, as though the speaker stood beside her. Winnipeg was east.

Jean got up. The person she could hear was half asleep, the thread was fragile, but somehow far clearer than the bar tender, who was awake. She stepped out in to the night, following the thread. She wasn't far from her, the mind she was following felt female. Jean looked at the row of trucks, she could still feel the thread, just about, but it felt like the other woman had gone back to sleep. She walked along behind the tailgates. That one. The woman going to Winnipeg was in that cab, the one loaded with planks of wood. Jean noted its plates and went back inside. Waking the woman up probably wasn't the best way to introduce herself. She had four hours to wait. The bar tender stared at her.

"You getting anything?"

She didn't even look at him, just kept her eyes on the floor and went back to where she'd been sitting in the corner.

 _I am not worth your notice._

He looked back at what he was reading.

She might as well try to get a bit more sleep, though she didn't feel like sleep was helping her much. She wasn't waking up less tired. She sighed. She needed sleep. Even if it didn't feel like it was helping her, it probably was. You die faster from sleep deprivation than from starvation. She drew her knees up and leant her head against the wall.

,

She walked out through the corridors. Storm hadn't been in her room when Jean had woken up. Jean needed to speak to her, so she was looking for her. Most of the school was just starting to wake up. She had a feeling that Storm might be riding. She often tried to get an hour on horseback before breakfast on a Saturday.

Sure enough, there she was, running the white horse round the sand paddock. She seemed to be concentrating pretty hard. She didn't notice Jean until she rode right past her.

"Oh hey." She said, the horse slowed down. "You alright?"

"Yeah, I just… I wanted to talk to you about Resa."

The two of them walked back towards the main school together, Storm still covered in her horse's hair.

"I mean I could tell she was homesick, but… do you think we've got any reason to think there's anything more sinister going on?"

"I don't know." Jean replied. "That's why I wanted to ask you. She just seems… listless to me, I guess it's early days, but I don't think she's eating or sleeping well."

"I think she's kind of grieving as well. She's not like one of the ones whose parents just decided that they were better off here, so she can go and see them in vacations and stuff, she's not even like the runaways. I mean, they threw her out. That's got to be hard."

Jean sighed. "So do you think we just wait it out for the moment?"

"Maybe. I don't know. Could we ask Erica or Amy, one of the senior girls, to keep an eye on her? She'd probably feel like that was less of an intrusion. Would… would you or the Professor know if she was going to put herself in real danger?"

"I wouldn't. I'm nowhere near sensitive enough. The Professor would if he was using Cerebro, otherwise… you tune it out most of the time, you have to. It'd drive you mad."

"I guess. Who do you recon we should ask to keep an eye on her?"

Jean twitched. She looked up at the clock. The woman going to Winnipeg was leaving at five, it was already past four. The woman in the dream, Storm, her real name was Ororo, Ororo Munroe. She just used her 'code name', her 'power name' almost to the exclusion of all else. She just liked Storm. As with the others she'd seen, Jean didn't question Storm's existence, or that she was to the East, East by Southeast. Jean shifted uncomfortably. She probably shouldn't let herself go back to sleep. She got to her feet and stepped out in to the cold morning air.

* * *

 **I'd like to ask, do you notice anything about the flashbacks?**


	6. Chapter 6

It didn't take her a minute to find the truck the woman heading East was in. To her relief, it was still there. She sat down on the ground to wait, trying to listen for that woman.

She waited maybe half an hour before the woman woke up.

 _Oh shut up. I'm awake. Four forty? Okay, I need a shower._

Jean hadn't showered since she'd come out of the lake. She knew she smelt, but it just wasn't a priority right now. If she got impetigo so be it. She'd survive. She needed to get home. The cab door opened. The woman who emerged was maybe forty-five, black haired and brown skinned, she looked like a Native American. She walked towards the diner, a small bag over her shoulder. Jean didn't try to talk to her, not yet. She was still half asleep.

Ten minutes later, the woman came back, hair wet and plaited. Jean got up and started towards her. The woman turned, wary but not hostile.

"Where are you headed?"

"Winnipeg." Her voice was low pitched for a woman. "You looking for a ride?"

"Yes."

The woman offered a hand to Jean. Jean took it. "Winnipeg the right way for you?"

"Yes."

"Okay, I'm Marie." She still hadn't let go of Jean's hand.

"I'm Phoenix." She'd be okay. She'd be safe with this woman. She could trust her, she could tell her the truth. She definitely did not need to hurt her.

Marie let go. "Right, hop in."

What..? Where had that come from? She didn't know this woman. Yes, she seemed safe, but Jean still had to keep her ears open. But she couldn't believe Marie would hurt her. What was...?

Empath. Jean felt calmer than made sense in the circumstances, she could rationalise why she shouldn't be so calm, but it made no difference. The woman was an empath. That was why she'd held on to Jean's hand for so long, most empaths needed to touch a person to influence them. And, of course, that was why she'd picked out Marie's thought so easily. Mutants were always easier to hear. She didn't recognise Marie, they knew very well there were mutants who chose not to interact with them, but it was always something of a surprise to meet one.

"We won't quite make Winnipeg tonight, but it should be early tomorrow."

Jean nodded to show she understood.

* * *

 **Chapter 7 carries a trigger warning for grief,  
since we depart from Jean and return to Xavier's school for gifted youngsters**

 **The plot makes sense without it.  
We'll be back with Jean in chapter 8.**

 **If you are in any doubt, please protect yourself and skip to chapter 8**


	7. Chapter 7: Trigger warning - grief

**This chapter carries a trigger warning for grief,**

 **since we part with Jean and return to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.**

 **If you are in any doubt, please skip and protect yourself.**

 **The plot makes sense without this chapter and I am very happy to summarise it at the top of chapter 8**

* * *

Professor Charles Xavier heard someone knock on his door.

"Come." He already knew who it was, even if the pattern of his thoughts had been out of sorts for days now, and it was showing no sign of improving. The door opened. "Scott." Scott closed the door behind himself. It did not require even an iota of telepathy to tell how distressed he was. He was breathing faster than he should have been, there was tension in every line of his body and he wasn't looking directly at Charles. Odd. Scott's visor made his eyes impossible to see, but still Scott was avoiding his eyes. Body language was hard to un-learn. "Do sit." Charles chanced to look a little deeper.

Scott's mind was usually quiet and relatively legible. It hadn't been like that since Jean had died, but how… disordered it was varied. At this moment, it was like trying to read a page being held out by a person with severe palsy.

 _I have to. I have to. I don't- I can't – I don't know how I can go on like this._

 _Just sit down._

Scott sat. Even the way he did that wasn't normal. He was resting his elbows on his knees, leaning forwards, head in his hands.

 _Get yourself together, you have to do this._

There was unmistakable dread in Scott's mind. He was desperate. Desperate men were dangerous. Yet Charles could not believe that Scott would hurt him.

"I'm guessing you know why I'm here." He said, after a moment.

"No." Charles replied truthfully. "I don't."

Scott drew breath slowly and looked straight down. He looked tired. "I keep seeing her." And Charles saw the echoes of it in his mind. Walking with her, talking to her… Charles felt himself tense. He'd thought- "Every time I go to sleep, she's there." There was a pause. "It's getting to the point now that I'm afraid to go to bed, because…" Charles waited. "Because I know I'll see her and it'll be like… none of this ever happened." Scott swallowed. "And then I'll wake up." Charles felt the implication of that. He'd felt the same when he'd dreamed of her. To wake and find her gone was like returning to the moment by the lake when he'd felt her die.

"These dreams, Scott."

Scott shook his head. "To start with it was nightmares, like…" He tailed off. "I hurt her, did you know that? I hurt her before the end."

"You were far from the only one Stryker abused." Charles said gently. Stryker had made him do far worse. He could glean some of the content of those dreams. Scott had dreamed he'd killed Jean, left her screaming in the water.

"But the last couple of days…" Scott shook his head. "It's like she's there, in the room." He looked up at Charles directly. "I can't handle this. I can't… I can't go on."

"Scott, this is grief."

"This can't-"

"It's only been a week Scott. It is right and natural that you should grieve, you've just lost your wife," He felt Scott think that they hadn't ever been married. "in all but name." They'd been together for so long they might as well have been, and they were more loyal to one another than many married couples he'd known. "What you feel is entirely normal for one-"

Scott got up very suddenly. Charles felt himself prepare to use his power. This was Scott, he reminded himself. He had never known Scott to lash out. Scott turned away and took two steps towards the window.

 _Stop. Stop. No. Stop this._

He was breathing hard. He set his hands on the windowsill, as though to stop them shaking. "This… These dreams. They can't be normal. I don't… I don't see how anyone survives this."

"The very realistic dreams… they may not be normal. I've had one like that. For the duration and a moment after they make you think she never died. Of course that's painful. If you have them too… I don't know what they are. I wonder if they are the effect of a telepath dying so… suddenly" He stopped himself from saying 'violently'. "and while using her powers so intensely. She left… marks on some of us, an impression of her mind. I'm sure it will fade, but until it does, we must bear it."

Scott sighed heavily. "Is there… I know you've blocked memory before. Is there nothing you can do?"

"I've removed a time period from the mind of a child, but this… No Scott. I wouldn't dare. Jean is… you were together for so long, she's wrapped up in every part of you, every part of who you are. I'd be afraid that in trying to help you I'd destroy you."

There was a very long silence.

 _Might be a risk worth taking. I'm not me right now. I can't go on like this, and I don't see a way out._

Charles thought that that justified a use of telepathy he'd usually have considered very intrusive. He increased his contact with Scott's mind, resisting the urge to pull back from the pain, and settled other thoughts there. If he was gentle, Scott might well not notice that they weren't his.

 _Still the leader of the X-men, we can't lose another. Still a teacher. Still almost a father to half the children here. What will they do if you are lost? They are also grieving already._

It would not have worked on Jean, he'd trained her too well, but on Scott, it seemed to. He would not lose another. Scott's thoughts had felt too similar to the thoughts of one contemplating suicide for him not to intervene.

"So what the hell do I do?"

"Just what you are doing. You carry on. You get up each day, you teach, you mentor, when the need arises you lead the X-men, as you always have."

Scott had turned back to face him. "Just carry on."

"Yes." Charles said. He saw Scott draw breath to reply. "This is grief, Scott. Admittedly the effects of her power complicate things, but this is grief."

Scott sighed. "Kim's changed her seat in my class, she's gone to the back corner." Kim was a fifteen-year-old empath, she'd been at the school about two months.

"Kim," Charles replied. "is a hypersensitive, newly manifested teenager. She's so scared of her own power that she's more shy of physical contact than Rogue is. I don't think she's anywhere close to as sensitive as she thinks she is, I think it's at least half psychogenic. She thinks she'll be upset by being near you, so she dreads it so fiercely she makes herself upset. She's not a good measurement." Charles took a breath. "Have you eaten yet this morning?"

"No."

"Let's go to breakfast then. I have a class in half an hour."


	8. Chapter 8

**For anyone who skipped 7,**

 **Chapter 7 showed Scott asking Xavier to palliate his grief. Xavier felt there was nothing he could, or should, do.**

* * *

Jean had probably been in the cab with Marie for about half an hour before she said anything. She knew Marie was curious about her, but didn't want to show that she was.

"Who are they?" Jean asked, indicating a photo on the dash.

"My kids." Marie replied. "They've grown a bit since then. Byron and Rain." Byron at least had to be a mutant. Mutant women always had mutant sons. In the photograph, they looked maybe twelve and eight. "Byron's going to start high school in the fall, Rain's eleven. You got kids?"

"No."

"Figures, to look at you."

"Who takes care of them while you're…"

"My sister. Hers are a bit older. If you don't have kids, how do you fill your time?"

"I'm a teacher." Jean said, which was true.

"Teaching what?"

"High school biology."

"So how did you wind up hitching across southern Canada wearing that? You don't sound Canadian."

"I'm not. And it's a very long story."

"We got time."

Jean hesitated. She didn't think Marie would be hostile to her because she was a mutant, but a lot of the story wasn't hers to tell.

"To put it simply, I came off worse in a fight and everyone thinks I'm dead. If I call home, they won't believe it's me." In their place, she definitely would have thought it was Mystique. Even face to face, convincing them that she was real might be a challenge. And even if they didn't she had the feeling she wasn't quite all there. She'd tried to imagine calling home a couple of times, and found that she just couldn't remember the number, no matter how hard she tried. And she had no idea of the address, nor what her home was called. She knew she'd lived there a long time, and that it was a school, but… She'd cross that bridge when she came to it.

"So you just turn up in person and…"

"Something like that." There was a silence. "You're an empath, aren't you?"

Marie set her jaw and started to pull over. "If you have a problem with that, there's the door."

"No." Jean said. The truck ground to a halt. "No, I…" She reached for her power and made the blue stone pendant around Marie's neck rise up, just a couple of inches. Marie looked down at it, then across at Jean. "So am I. Not an empath, but…" She let the pendant drop. "I'm telekinetic."

"Not anti-mutant then?"

"No."

"And they let you teach." Marie took the handbrake off and started the truck moving again.

"Not everywhere's the same."

There was silence for a moment.

"You hear about the attack on the president a couple of weeks back?" Jean nodded mutely. "That… I want to punch that guy. Every time something like that happens it makes it worse for all of us. I guess it's not so bad for me cause I can hide my mutation. But… I had an uncle who grew gills, used to work as a diver. He had a really hard life. Drank himself to death in the end. Actually, back up. How did you know?"

Jean looked quizzically at her.

"How did you know I was an empath?"

"I've spent a lot of time with a lot of different mutants. I've got good at telling when someone's using a mental power on me. Doesn't mean it doesn't work, just means I notice. Do you always do that if you pick up hitchers?"

"Yeah." Marie replied shortly. "Not a lot of women out here, it's not always that safe. But I guess you've probably noticed that."

Jean nodded.

They didn't talk much, Marie seemed happy to sit in silence. Occasionally she'd say something about politics, but they never talked for long. Marie was uncomfortably cynical, but Jean supposed she could understand why. She talked of indigenous women going missing by the hundred, and no government, no police, caring. She was scared for her daughter, not so much for herself. She could make anyone not want to hurt her. Jean dared to try to doze for a bit around midday.

,

It wasn't like the dreams she'd had before, where sights, sounds, smells, everything had been so consumingly real. But neither did it feel like the twitches of a sleeping brain. She heard voices, saw a corridor, wood paneled, wood floored, white ceiling, paintings hanging every few feet. Teenagers were walking along in twos and threes, the hubbub of their minds too close together, too similar to be distinct. But there were voices there, minds, that were distinct.

The truck jolted.

"Ass!" Marie shouted, blaring the horn. She glanced across at Jean. "Sorry. He pulled out right in front of me.

"I have to go south." Jean said.

"What?"

"I have to go south."

"You said east before."

"I know. And I still need to go east, but… it's more like southeast now."

"Where are you getting this from?"

"I can't explain it, but… I just know. If I stay with you, I'll be too far north."

Marie drew breath slowly. "Okay, we'll be in Moose Jaw in an hour, I'll see if I can find someone going… across the border?"

Jean nodded. "Like you said, I'm not Canadian."

"Do you have papers?"

Jean hadn't thought of that. "I'll deal with that when I get there."

Marie frowned. "Do you know what the penalty is for that?"

"I'll find a way."

"You going to use your power to fly over or something?"

"Something."

,

Moose Jaw had its own truck stop, Marie bought them both bacon rolls from the back of a van and sent Jean back to the truck.

"I'll find you a ride. You just stay here."

Jean was happy to stand still and eat. She hadn't had anything since 3pm yesterday. It was about twenty minutes before Marie came back.

"Here she is. Phoenix, this is Isaac." Jean looked round. There was a boy at Marie's shoulder, brown skinned and black haired like Marie was, his hair cut close to his head. He was at that stage of being all limbs and no flesh, presumably clumsy with it, most of them were at that age. He smiled at her in greeting. "Isaac is going to Chicago. I have no idea if that's any good for you, but he'll get you to the border at least."

Jean nodded. "No, that's great. Thank you."

"No problem, and Isaac." Marie reached in to her pocket. "Here's twenty bucks to feed her with. She doesn't look like she's seen too much food past couple of days."

Isaac took the money and smiled. "I won't be able to use this past Portal, you know. I need US dollars really."

"If you don't want it, give it back." Marie said, smiling. She offered a hand to Isaac who shook it.

"You gonna help me out?"

"You sound like a drug addict."

They let go of each other. Isaac was smiling more broadly now. "Right, come on. My truck's this way."

,

"So," Isaac said, starting the engine. "You heading to Chicago?"

"Through it." Jean said. She had a feeling that she needed to go further than that.

"How long have you known Marie?"

"'S only the second time I've seen her to tell you the truth. We were stopped over together once, I noticed her necklace and went to talk to her, spent a couple of hours talking over food. You don't see many Blackfoot truckers, so you remember the ones you do see." He tailed off, backing the truck up carefully. He didn't do this with the practiced ease of Marie or Lars. He was young enough to be the son of either one of them. He didn't speak again until they were on the road. "So, Phoenix, what brings you here?"

"What? To Moose Jaw or...?"

"Whatever you took the question to mean."

Jean frowned. He sounded like a therapist. "I was riding with Marie, she's going to Winnipeg, that's too far north for me."

Isaac said nothing, as though he was waiting for her to continue. She was not going to sit here and talk about herself.

"How about you? How do you come to be driving a truck of…"

"It's planks of wood, well, MDF board. It's not that exciting."

"To Chicago?" Jean finished.

Isaac shrugged. "It's better money than waiting tables or stacking shelves. I know a guy who knows a guy who runs the plant that makes these, he's selling them to a guy in Chicago. If I don't work some, I won't get through college."

Jean raised her eyebrows. "You're in college? What do you study?"

"I'm a psychology major," That explained his first question. "minor in addiction studies."

"And you're… what? On study leave?"

"I've got a couple of weeks leave before exams, I said I'd do one run with the truck."

"Are you not supposed to be revising?"

"I… I sort of am, just… Actually, would you mind helping me? I'll buy you a doughnut."

"Sure." Jean said slowly.

"There's a textbook under the seat there." Jean leant forward to look. It was a heavy book, much used and battered. "Can you… can you test me on stuff?"

"Of course."

"There's a chapter about experimental models in psychology. Can you start there?"

"Okay." Jean found the index, then found the chapter. There were coffee stains on the first page of it. She smiled. She'd done this. The wall charts of when you were going to study what, the endless, endless coffee to keep you going long after you should have given up and gone to bed… She'd done college. The realisation didn't surprise her, but she hadn't articulated it before. "Can you outline the scientific method in six steps?"

,

It made the time pass. They'd go through Isaac's psychology textbook, page by page, for half an hour or so, then stop for a bit, then start again.

"You're good at this." Isaac remarked after the third round, they were on to neurochemistry now. Everything there was familiar to Jean.

"I am a teacher." Jean replied, without thinking.

"So how do you come to be hitching rides?"

"It's a very long story and I really don't want to talk about it." She said calmly.

"Okay. Oh, we're only twenty minutes from the border now. Do you have papers?"

Jean sighed. "No."

"That could be a problem."

"I'll hide in the back. If I'm found I'll say I stowed away, that you didn't know I was in there."

,

Isaac stopped the truck in a lay-by so Jean could move. It was very uncomfortable, standing between the stack of wood, nearly twice as tall as she was, and the front wall of the truck. She felt like the whole lot could come down on top of her if Isaac braked too hard. She braced with her power until she felt the truck's engine stop. She could hear men's voices. She felt for minds. That was Isaac, there were two others. She felt one of them wondering if they ought to just check the back.

 _There's nothing in the back._

 _Just a pile of wood._

 _Fresh coffee inside. You can almost smell it._

He bent. She felt him hand Isaac's papers back over and walk away. The truck's engine started again. She braced the stack of wood in front of her. It was strapped up, but somehow she didn't think those straps would save her.

It couldn't have been more than a few minutes before the engine stopped again and the back of the truck opened up. She relaxed gratefully.

"Phoenix?" Isaac called. She came out to meet him. "Come on. We got four and a half hours of driving time left today, and we're going to talk about dopamine."

Jean smiled and followed him.

* * *

 **As ever, please review**


	9. Chapter 9

They made it through neurochemistry, CNS anatomy, the fundaments of perception (Jean found herself wondering how telepathy fitted in) and sensation, and to a town called Fessenden before they stopped for the night. This might require a bit of care. Isaac hadn't seemed interested in asking her… but boredom and the onset of night could change that very quickly. He bought food for both of them and set the seats of the cabin back, making a bed.

"There's a shower block over there." He said. "Do you want…?"

"Cubicles or room?" She hadn't washed since she'd come out of the lake, she was filthy, but she was not interested in holding the sort of telepathic fight that would result if she stripped off in a room full of strange men.

"I'll go first and check." Isaac said.

He came back ten minutes later and said that there were cubicles, but you had to pay for them. He handed her the money as he said it.

It wasn't until she started stripping off that she realised quite how dirty she was. She smelled, of a mix of stale water and stale sweat. She wanted to scrub every inch of her skin and soak the smell out of her hair, but it was cold in here. If she went to sleep cold and wet she might make herself ill. And when she turned the water on, it was barely tepid. She gritted her teeth and started washing. She had nothing clean to change in to, and nothing to dry herself with. She left her hair dry. Wetting that would probably make her colder than anything else would. It was the best she could do. At least she hadn't got her period. She turned the water off and started to look over her skin, looking for signs of infection. There weren't any. Not even tinea pedis on her feet from that first night, walking in wet boots for hours. How? How was her skin intact after that, then staying in the same shoes and socks for days? Come to that, why did she not have pneumonia? Her lungs should have filled with water. She didn't even know why she hadn't drowned. Even if she'd been able to push the water out of herself by telekinesis, it should have been far too late for that. Even if you got past that, she should have had respiratory compromise from near drowning, and even if you got past that, surely that water hadn't been sterile. She should have had pneumonia, the sort of pneumonia that landed you in the ICU for days, at least. Jean shook her head. What was happening to her?

She didn't know, she had no way of finding out. She just needed to get home.

She went back to the cab. Isaac tried to insist she took the sleeping bag.

"No." She said firmly. "It's yours. Even without it this'll be the most comfortable night I've spent in a while."

"No, you're my guest. You have it."

"Isaac, no." She lay down, the other way round to the sleeping bag, and facing away from it.

Isaac huffed. "Have it your own way."

She was tired, but she shouldn't let herself fall asleep until he did. It didn't take him long. She could still feel the movement of the truck, she'd grown so used to it now. She'd dream. She knew she'd dream, but she had to sleep.

,

She did dream. Of course she dreamed. She dreamed she was with Scott. She dreamed of how he touched her, how she touched him, what they said. She dreamed she made him laugh, and how the laughter running through his body felt at that moment. She dreamed she kissed him, short and gentle, then long and deep, until she felt she couldn't breathe.

Then, far away, east by southeast, he woke. He turned closed, unseeing eyes towards the place she usually lay. He started to reach out a hand for her, but stopped himself. He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. She felt the surge of his grief.

 _Scott._

She reached out for him. The thread joining them was so weak, so fragile, but she had to try.

 _Scott! Can you hear me?_

"Jean." She felt him mouth the words as though it was her mouth. "Just... please let me go. I can't take this."

He didn't think she could hear. He thought she was gone, a ghost inside his head.

 _Damn it Scott! Come on. I need you to hear me._

But he was slipping away.

Jean gasped and woke fully. She'd lost him. Isaac shifted. She didn't know how to make him go back to sleep. No, he wasn't really quite awake. If she just kept still… She balled her fists in her armpits. Her body had reacted to that as though she'd actually been with Scott. It took her a few minutes to settle. She needed to sleep. She hadn't really slept last night, she'd spent the night before walking. She was exhausted.

,

"Come." She heard the Professor's voice from inside his study, and knew at once that something was wrong.

She opened the door. "Professor?" He looked up at her. He looked... mournful. Nobody at the school had died. What had happened? "What's…"

"I've just received this letter." He said, indicating a piece of paper on the desk. "It concerns one Elijah Smith, or Elijah Smith that was." The Professor ran a hand over his face. Jean felt her mouth open slightly and waited for him to go on. "He was twelve, he had Downs Syndrome." Jean sat down, almost holding her breath. "Yesterday, he was shot dead by police."

Jean blinked and swallowed hard. Twelve.

"Accounts are still a little confused," The Professor continued. "But it seems that young Elijah Smith witnessed a member of his extended family threatening his mother, possibly with some sort of weapon."

"Oh no." Jean said softly. Elijah Smith had been a mutant, surely. Seeing a parent or sibling attacked was a common reason for young mutants to display their powers for the first time.

The Professor nodded grimly. "By most accounts, some sort of beam of energy came forth from the boy, and killed the man threatening his mother outright, wounding her. The boy was terrified, understandably, and caused a great deal of damage to his surroundings as he ran away, mercifully no other lives were lost. Police eventually caught up with him, at which point he blew a hole ten inches wide in the police car and was shot dead by the police. The police say a bright red beam came from the boy's eyes and destroyed whatever it touched." Scott. This was Scott's power. "They had no way to approach him safely, he did not respond to hails… they shot him. They report that it took twenty to thirty seconds for the beam from his eyes to die out." Jean closed her eyes. Twelve. He'd just panicked, hadn't he? Scott had talked to her about how scared he'd been to have his body do something so destructive whenever he opened his eyes, and there be no way for him to stop it, thinking he'd never be able to open his eyes again. "I can't help but wonder if…" The Professor waved his hand. "If we'd known, if we'd got there first if…" He tailed off. "This could have ended differently."

Jean leant gently on his mind, he let her in, let her see what he thought might have happened if they'd been better, faster.

 _"_ _Kid, close your eyes. You won't hurt anyone if your eyes are closed." Scott was still half in cover, half behind a wall. There was debris everywhere, but the boy closed his eyes. "That's it. I'm going to come over to you now. You need to keep your eyes closed. Do you understand me?" The boy nodded. "Good kid. I know you're scared, but I need you to trust me. I think there's a way I can make your eyes safe for a while, but you need to keep your eyes closed until I say. Do you understand?" The boy nodded again. "Good. If I'm going to help you, I need to come over to you. Keep still and keep your eyes closed." Scott started forwards. "Okay, this is my plan. My eyes are like yours, I have a visor that makes me safe. I'm going to give you my visor, but as soon as I do that, I can't open my eyes, so I need to know that you won't run off or try to hurt me."_

The speech tailed off, but the Professor saw the scene play out quite distinctly.

 _Scott walked up to the boy and put his hand on his shoulder. He asked the boy to look up at the sky, then removed his own visor, closing his eyes, and held it in place on the boy's head. He told the boy to open his eyes. Storm's voice called out that the visor was working._

"Assuming ruby quartz would have worked on him." Jean said.

The Professor sighed quietly.

Jean could imagine outcomes that were no better than what had happened. She lent gently on the Professor's mind again and invited him to hers. He came.

She showed him a boy too scared to understand a word Scott said to him, lashing out in uncontrolled terror at Scott as he started to approach, burning a patch out of his clothes, damaging his visor so Scott curled on the ground, hands over his eyes, afraid to move, then the sound of a shot.

She showed him the ruby quartz not working, the boy's power tearing straight through Scott's visor and destroying it, and she didn't doubt Scott would have tried to use his visor to calm the boy down.

She showed him Scott starting the approach, the same way as before, but when he told the boy to look up, the boy opened his eyes. Then the police shot him. Right in front of Scott. Or worse. One of the cops, bad shot or trigger happy or xenophobic, didn't shoot Elijah. As the boy crumpled and went still, eyes still burning, so did Scott.

Jean pulled herself sharply back to the present. That was too painful to contemplate.

"We wouldn't necessarily have made things turn out any better."

The professor sighed heavily. "We'll never know. There's nothing to be done for the boy now, of course, but I feel we should reach out to his family." To do what? Jean wondered. They'd lost their son, they couldn't really do anything to make that better. "To make sure they know their rights regarding his body, if nothing else." The Professor clarified. "I can think of certain people who might regard this as an opportunity to get their hands on a mutant cadaver and nothing else. Would you be willing to go, Jean?"

He woke. East by southeast, the Professor woke. Jean gathered herself to push, to make him aware of her. He was so much more sensitive to telepathy than anyone else.

It felt as though she'd run headlong in to a wall. He was blocking her. She gritted her teeth. He was blocking her out. Damn it, how was she going to do this? Scott wasn't sensitive enough to hear her, the Professor was choosing not to, he was so certain she was dead.

* * *

 **As ever, please review.**


	10. Chapter 10

Jean twitched. Her foot connected with something in the dark.

"Ow." It said.

"Sorry."

"-back to sleep." Isaac said, just about comprehensibly.

,

She was kneeling on the floor. Ace on two, king on ace, no queens. Cards over. Five on – no, damn! Storm had got there before her. Storm had another six there. She picked up her five and waited, staring at Storm. Storm stared back at her, then feinted forwards, grinning.

"No powers." Storm said

"Of-"

Storm slapped the card down and turned her last card over. It was a nine anyway, and Jean was already there.

"We're stuck, aren't we?" Jean said.

Storm put her hand over her deck. "One, two, three."

They both turned new cards over and the race started again. Storm was two cards ahead of her.

"Slam."

"Yeah, fair enough." They gathered their cards to start again.

"So where's Scott tonight?"

"Evening lecture at… somewhere. And you asking me off the wall questions usually means you're bluffing, so I raise you five." Jean set five m&m's down on the table between them.

"Do you really?" Storm put down five of her own. "Next card?"

Jean turned it over. Six of clubs. Difficult to connect to anything already out.

"Stick." Storm said.

"Stick." Jean agreed. She turned over the next card. Queen of hearts.

"Raise you three." Storm said, without hesitating.

Jean frowned at her. "You're bluffing." She put three of her own m&m's down to match Storm's.

Storm dropped her hand face up on the table. "Two queens. You going to beat that?"

Jean started laughing, then dropped her own hand. "Two queens. What do we do now?"

"Highest other card." Storm said. She had an ace, Jean had a jack. Jean pushed the modest pile of candy over to Storm, who picked two up and put them in her mouth.

"Who shuffled these?"

"You did." Storm answered, round the candy. "I like playing when it's just you and me. I can actually win some." Jean smiled. "I don't know if it's just because I can't see his eyes, but Scott… I've known him since I was fifteen, I still don't know what his tells are."

"His glasses are definitely an unfair advantage."

"But if you used your power… Has that ever occurred to you? To go to Vegas and read everyone else's minds and wipe out at poker?"

Jean shook her head. "I don't have anything like the concentration to read the minds of half a dozen strangers at that distance at once. The Professor probably could. I couldn't."

Thump! Storm sat up and looked around. It was dark. She was in bed. Where was – Jean was dead. She'd drowned saving the rest of them.

 _Storm!_

Jean called out, without really expecting it to work.

Something had made a pretty loud noise. She should go and check it out.

 _Storm! For the third time tonight, I'm here._

Storm got up and reached for her robe. Jean lost sight of her.

She woke sharply. Her head hurt. She'd been in three people's heads in the space of… what? Maybe six hours? And at a range of over a thousand miles. Of course that wasn't comfortable. She never pushed her telepathy anything like this hard. But if someone had told her three months ago, or even three weeks ago, that she'd hold back a flood while getting the Blackbird airborne, she'd never have believed it. What was happening to her?

Right now, it didn't matter. She needed to get home.

She hadn't slept properly in days. Lying still in the dark, of course she started to drift towards sleep again.

,

It didn't feel like much time passed before Isaac's alarm went off. Isaac rolled over and hit out at it, grumbling incoherently. After a minute, he sat up, rubbing his eyes.

"You fidget." He said. His voice had dropped a lot in pitch over night.

"Sorry." Jean said.

He yawned broadly. "Get out. Gonna change."

Isaac was clearly not a morning person. He spoke exclusively in sentences under three words for the first forty minutes, and only had a granola bar for breakfast, though he did offer her one. Eventually, they settled back in to the schedule of revision.

"We're going to make Chicago tonight." Isaac said after the third round of revision. "So help me, but we are, and if I have to lie on my time card I don't care. We're making Chicago tonight." He smiled to himself. "And when I get home, all I'm going to hear for three days is 'All that Jazz'."

"Why?" Jean asked.

"'Cause my little sister loves Broadway."

"How old is she?"

"Fifteen. She'd love to go pro, but… I don't think she'd make it. There are girls who've been having private lessons since they were five. No one's quite got the heart to tell her yet. She loves it."

"Well, maybe not Broadway, but…"

Isaac sighed. "I don't know. You got siblings?"

"No."

"That must have been lonely."

"I was in boarding school from quite young."

"Ouch! I'd have hated that! Being taken away from my Mom and my siblings…"

"It was right for me." Jean said simply. She had no intention of letting Isaac know how true that was.

"Didn't you miss your parents?"

"At first, but… the headmaster is more of a father to me than my biological father now, the girls I shared a dorm with are like my sisters." She heard him forming more questions. "Anyway." She said. "Tell me the four stages of sleep."

,

They did make Chicago inside Isaac's driving time, but only just. Isaac parked at what seemed to be the first truck stop he'd found, with visible relief.

"I'll take her over to the client in the morning, and I'll find someone to take you…"

"East." Jean said.

Isaac looked sideways at her. "You could tell me a city, you know, or even a state."

"Does it matter?"

He hesitated. "I guess not, but… hey, it's going to give me a hell of a campfire story. The redhead I picked up and smuggled in to the USA, without ever knowing where she was going."

Jean smiled. "I heard a better one." Isaac tilted his head at her, encouraging her to go on. "I heard some guys talking just before Marie took me on. They were talking about a man who calls himself The Wolf." Better not leave it too close to the truth; wasn't that the point of campfire stories? "He's a cage fighter, they said he fought six men, one after the other after the other, and won every time. That's how he gets his drinking money. No matter how hard he gets hit, he just gets up and carries on again."

Isaac frowned. "What? Kuekuatsu?"

"What?"

"Kuekuatsu, Wolverine. Someone could mishear 'wolverine' as 'wolf'. He's… well, he's supposed to be a man who just goes around on his own, fights for money, can't be killed." Jean felt her mouth fall open slightly. She had not been expecting that. "I think the oldest story of him is from like… 1910? Or earlier, even. So it can't possibly be the same guy, I think now it's like… if someone takes a really bad battering and still wins a fight, people who've had a bit too much to drink will be like 'oh, he's Kuekuatsu, don't talk to him'. He's supposed to be really bad luck. Not because he'll kill you, it's like 'death follows him' or something. If you let him try to protect you, you're supposed to die within three years or something."

"Seriously?"

"Come on, it's bull. It's a good story, but it's bull."

If he only knew…

"Oh, I'm gonna go call my Mom, let her know I'm in Chicago, is there anyone you need to phone?"

Jean drew a breath. She could not remember the phone number, nor even what her home was called, it was as though she was still coming to, as though she was still half in the water. "No."

"You sure?"

"I'm sure."


	11. Chapter 11

They bought pre-packaged sandwiches and went straight to bed, Isaac said nothing about showering, so Jean didn't either. It might be better if she wasn't too clean. It might be dangerous to be appealing. As before, they slept on opposite sides, heads at opposite ends.

She knew she needed to sleep, and she needed the dreams. Every time she woke from one, the beacon guiding her home was stronger. She only a vague idea of how far it was, but she knew she was getting closer. But she was increasingly aware of the distress she caused to the people she dreamed with, particularly Scott. As horrible as it was, she needed to hurt them. She needed to get home, the dreams were her compass.

,

"Scott, the hospital just called."

Even around his glasses, she saw him frown. "To say what?"

"Someone's called in sick, they need another doctor on the four-til-four shift tonight."

Scott's frown deepened. "And they're asking you?"

"Yes." She had a feeling that she knew where this was going, but she was not going to go back on her word just because he didn't like it.

"And you said yes." His voice was oozing with disapproval.

"Yes."

"Four hours notice for a twelve hour shift."

"Someone called in sick. It happens sometimes."

He shook his head slightly. "Doesn't mean you have to pick up the slack, you're not a tenured employee. You don't owe them anything."

"I don't owe them. We've been through this before. We need to keep them owing us favours because some day one of us is going to come home with injuries I can't fix. Then we are going to need them to be on side."

"How many of these shifts have you done for them this year? Twelve hour shifts, and you charge them beans for a locum doctor-"

"This is not about money and it is not about time."

"I didn't say it was."

"Then why did you bring it up?"

"Because this is not how you make them like you. This is how you teach them that they can push you around."

"Scott, you don't hear the conversations I have with The Dean-"

"What he says to you when he needs a favour doesn't matter. He's using you."

"What if I want to do it? What if I want to see another person who understands medicine once in a while?"

"You get that at the training events, don't you?"

"It's not the same. You learn a lot more from having a patient in front of you with someone else. It's not as if there was anything planned for tonight."

"Hey, that was not my point."

"Wasn't it?"

"No. You jump at their order, they keep you up all night and we have no guarantee that they would actually help us if we needed it."

"You don't know anything about this Scott. They would. I know they would."

"Or do you just want to believe it?"

"Scott, I'm a telepath. I know when people are lying to me. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to bed for a couple of hours." She started to walk past him. "Don't wait up." There was no need to say it, he wouldn't have waited, not until 4:30 AM, it was just a way of stopping him from saying it.

"Do me a favour, try not to wake me when you get in."

"Of course." She said coldly. Jerk. She was going to be far more tired than he was.

East, due east now, he shifted and woke. He lay still for a moment, eyes closed, then pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. There was no coherent thought, just the weight of exhausting, formless grief. Pressure added to hopeless pressure. A tremor ran through his body.

 _This is never going to end._

She gathered herself to reach for him. Maybe tonight… she was closer. She had to be, she didn't know how much closer, but she knew she was going the right way, or at least she thought she knew.

 _Scott! I'm here! Scott!_

Nothing she could feel in him changed. It was still just that weight of grief.

 _Scott, that was barely even a fight. Come on!_

She was losing him. She felt him sit up and reach for his glasses.

"Scott!" She'd lost him. There was a noise. She jerked awake and sat up.

"You quite yellin'?" A body, Isaac, asked sleepily a couple of feet away. She'd shouted. That had been the noise. And she'd lost Scott again.

"Dream." She said, by way of an explanation. She lay down again. This felt pointless. But her bearing had changed. Due east. She lived in the US, she was fairly sure of that, from Chicago to the coast was… 900 miles? At most? If home was due east from here, she had a maximum distance now. She'd take that. Even if she'd hurt Scott to get it. The best way she could help him was to prove herself alive, to get home. She lay down again. She couldn't just stay awake until she got home, she had to keep her wits about her. To do that, she needed to sleep.

,

"Hey, Rogue." The girl turned to look at Jean, with an 'am-I-in-trouble' look in her eyes. "Can I talk to you for a minute?"

"Sure." Rogue said, in a way that suggested to Jean that she didn't think she could refuse. She stepped out of the general crowd heading for lunch and joined Jean at the side of the corridor.

"It's nothing unpleasant, I just wanted to ask how you were settling in. I know you didn't have the best of starts."

Rogue smiled falteringly. "It's good, Doctor Grey." She didn't seem inclined to say any more.

"We couldn't pick up all of your classes, could we? We do try, but because we're small…"

"It's okay. I only lost Spanish, and I wasn't going to do well in that anyway."

"And the other students?"

"They're nice."

Jean stopped herself from asking if she meant the student body as a whole or Bobby in particular.

She kept on walking, leading Rogue away from the group playing basketball.

"Okay, I've only got one thing to say to you, but I need to be completely sure you understand me."

Rogue looked very wary. Maybe Bobby had warned her. Scott had got hold of Bobby twenty four hours earlier to do the very same thing that Jean was about to do.

"Right." Jean said. "Anybody with eyes can tell that you and Bobby are very fond of each other. That isn't a problem. You're both seventeen, it's fine. But there is something I want to be sure you're clear on," Rogue was turning steadily redder. "and I don't think anyone has to teach you this in Mississippi." Jean paused and took a breath. "Whatever Bobby asks you, you have an absolute right to say no. You don't have to give a reason, you aren't a bad person for leading him on. Your body is yours, you always – always – have the right to say no." Rogue was looking at the ground six feet behind Jean, and had gone fully scarlet. "It doesn't matter if you say no before anything starts or during, it doesn't matter who initiated it, anyone at any time has the right to say no and call a halt, because if the other person doesn't respect that, that's no longer sex, that's rape." Rogue wasn't looking at her, she looked desperately uncomfortable. Jean didn't particularly enjoy doing this either, but it was just so important that someone discussed this with them. "And of course this works the other way. If he says stop, you stop, that's not negotiable. Do you follow?"

Rogue nodded mutely. Poor girl. She looked mortified. Jean supposed she would have been at her age.

"Were you taught abstinence only?" Jean asked

Rogue nodded. It took her a moment to say anything. "They said nothing works against AIDs. And no one'll want to marry a girl who's-"

A basket ball flew out of the air behind them. Rogue squeaked and ducked, Jean threw her power against it. It stopped dead in mid air.

Someone sat up, looking around in the dark.

"Doctor Grey?" Rogue breathed.

She was going to try. If she couldn't reach Scott, she had no idea how she'd reach Rogue, but… unless the dream had made Rogue pick up telepathy. Just a bit. It didn't need to be much.

 _Rogue._

She turned the blanket back off her legs, straining her eyes in to the dark. She didn't want to wake the others. She put her reading light on.

 _Rogue, can you hear me?_

Rogue looked around the room. Kitty, Jubilee, Annette and Sarah were all there, fast asleep as far as she could see, but it felt like someone was watching her.

 _Yes Rogue. You're a mutant. Things beyond the normal are possible. How else might someone be trying to reach you?_

She got out of bed, picking up a cardigan as she did.

 _Rogue. You need to get the Professor to use Cerebro. If he does that, he'll find me. I need you to tell the Professor to use Cerebro._

Rogue turned to walk out of the dorm and the connection collapsed.

Jean woke fully. She had no idea if she'd got the message across. Rogue had been at least partially aware of her. Maybe if she spoke to The Professor he'd be able to join the dots up. She had to hope. The beacon to the East was so strong now. But even with that, she was too tired to stay awake lying still in the dark for long.

* * *

 **To be clear, Rogue is wrong about condoms not preventing the spread of 'AIDS'. If used correctly, they're pretty effective.**


	12. Chapter 12

Jean woke fully. She had no idea if she'd got the message across. Rogue had been at least partially aware of her. Maybe if she spoke to The Professor he'd be able to join the dots up. She had to hope. The beacon to the East was so strong now. But even with that, she was too tired to stay awake lying still in the dark for long.

,

"I also have some telepathic ability."

"Like your Professor?" Logan asked.

"Nowhere near that powerful, but he's teaching me to develop it."

He started towards her. "I'm sure he is." He stopped, not two feet in front of her. "So read my mind." He whispered.

"I'd rather not." She had a pretty clear idea of what he thought she'd find in there, and she didn't think she wanted to see that.

"Come on, afraid you might like it?" He smiled at her, challenging her, daring her.  
"I doubt that."

But he didn't back away. He just stayed there, his chest eighteen inches from hers, daring her to use her power. His was a new mind, a new challenge. If she just dived, if she made no attempt to look at the surface at all, if she went straight to look beneath…

She raised her hands slowly. He didn't flinch. She closed her eyes and pushed outwards, away from her self.

"No, no, no." The jet started to move. She was doing it. She was actually doing it. She'd cut her escape off. Save them, kill herself.

"No"

The jet rose clear of the water. He could still see the white swell around her, where she'd been holding the flood back, but he couldn't see her.

Then the pitch of the water dropped slightly. The swell disappeared. She'd let go. She'd let herself die. Either that, or she'd run out of strength lifting the jet too. The only sounds now were the jet's engines and the rushing water beneath.

"She's gone." He said. Somewhere to his right, Cyclops was starting to gasp. "She's gone."

"Don't say that!" Cyclops threw himself at him. Logan held his hands by his sides. Unless Scott used his eye beam, he couldn't do him that much damage. Smarter not to hit back. Cyclops grabbed him by the collar. "We gotta go back." But he knew. He knew just as well as the rest of them did. There was no way she was still alive.

"She's gone." Logan repeated.

"No!" Cyclops wrenched him sideways as hard as he could, nowhere near hard enough. "No!" He hit out at Logan again. Logan didn't even bother to block. She was gone. Cyclops shouted wordlessly, as though he'd been shot or stabbed, and fell against Logan. She was gone. She was gone. She'd given herself to save the rest of them. She was gone.

Logan gasped and woke. Due west of him, so did Jean. Sharp pain dragged at the back of both hands. His hands. She felt that if she breathed, she'd lose the connection. The shock of waking had already almost severed it. She felt as though she was watching his shadow through a veil. She had to try.

 _Logan._

He was looking around in the dark, claws still out, panting. He swallowed and pulled his claws back.

 _Logan, can you hear me?_

He was breathing hard. His hands were balled in to fists, he was still looking around.

 _Logan, I need you to tell The Professor to use Cerebro._

He got to his feet.

 _Tell The Professor to use Cerebro._

He padded out of the room. He wouldn't sleep again, not right after that.

Jean cursed softly and looked around in the dark. She hadn't woken Isaac at least. She rolled over to face away from him. She very much doubted she'd reached Logan. But what if she had. What if there was something in his head? Like the beacon leading her east. What if there was just an impulse, in him and Rogue? She hadn't tried to impress an instruction on Scott, but if Logan and Rogue both went to The Professor… He might. He might look for her. If she could recruit a third, if she could put the same instruction on someone else… The more people, the more likely The Professor would listen.

Yes, the dreams caused distress, but she had to get home. She didn't have a lift right now. She could potentially be stuck here for hours or days. If she could get them to look for her…

She curled up a little tighter and closed her eyes.

,

She rinsed the facecloth out again, then wrung it as dry as she could. Scott did the same with his beside her. She guided his hand to where to hang his before hanging her own to dry. He'd taken his glasses off to wash his face. The water was cooling her skin, it was so hot tonight. She had no intention of drying herself.

"You done in here?" He asked.

"Yeah." She took him by the hand and led him back to bed, picking up his glasses as she went. He trusted her enough that he didn't put his hand out in front of him when she led him. It was Storm's night on call. They wouldn't be disturbed unless someone needed medical attention. She set his glasses down on the nightstand and let him feel where they were, then backed on to the bed. He followed her, putting his other hand down. She'd cooled off to a comfortable temperature now.

She let go of his hand. They were both kneeling on the bed now. He reached for her, guessing. His hand brushed the skin of her chest. She held still for him, where was he going with this? She was certainly sated, she'd assumed he was. His other hand found her shoulder. He was going to kiss her. She could go with that. As the hand on her chest moved up to her neck, she put her hands on his shoulders. He leaned in to kiss her. She met him half way.

"I love you." He said softly as they broke apart.

"I love you too." She lay down, he did the same. They pulled the sheet – no way they were sleeping under more than a sheet tonight – up over themselves.

She drew her body up against Scott's. The blankets were drawn up over their heads. She had a feeling she'd get cold easily now she was still. He drew himself in to her in return. They'd spent so many nights lying chest to chest like this that they didn't need to fidget now. Both of them knew how tight they could hold, how much pressure was comforting, how much more than that it took to be uncomfortable. Both of them knew that he always slept with his hand over his eyes, but that the arm of that hand could reach around her first if they lay close enough, his other arm across the small of her back. One of her arms was wrapped under his shoulders, her other hand was resting on his thigh. His breathing was already slowing towards sleep.

She lay with her eyes open for a minute. Savouring this. She could still feel his body on hers, where he had been as much as where he was, sensations often lingered. She could hear the wind outside. There was more snow on the way tonight. When Storm was sure, it always happened. The grounds were already eerily quiet with snow. They'd pushed afternoon classes back by half an hour so everyone had time to go out and play in the snow over lunch. Bobby had, of course, spent all of that half hour making a six-foot tall, intricately detailed ice dragon, ignoring any and all snowballs thrown at him. Scott had threatened John with a detention if he melted the dragon, or even tried to.

Scott reached in to the dark and found empty space. And he'd believed it. He'd believed she was there. He brought his hands up to his eyes and cried out wordlessly. She was gone. She was gone.

 _Scott!_

She grit her teeth and pushed, as hard as she could.

 _Scott, hear me!_

He missed her. Oh God he missed her, every waking moment of every day, and a lot of the time he wasn't awake as well.

 _Scott!_

It was a shadow. A phantom left by the sudden death of so powerful a telepath. A scar on his mind.

 _Scott! You don't have to believe I'm real, but you have to make The Professor use Cerebro. Can you hear me?_

All that was left of Jean, he carried. He couldn't bear it, but he couldn't wish her, what little was left of her, gone.

 _Scott, you have to make The Professor use Cerebro. I'm coming. I'm coming home as fast as I can. Help me._

He turned on to his side and started to cry, hands over his eyes, shaking.

 _Scott!_

Jean let go. He… she didn't think he could hear her, not properly. But he was aware of her. But he was just so sure she was dead. Like The Professor. What would it take to get him to look for her? It wouldn't be enough, would it? What she'd done tonight wouldn't be enough. She was alone.

It was light. She sat up. Isaac's watch said 6:10. His alarm would go off in a few minutes. There was no point even trying to sleep.

* * *

 **Please review.**

 **The Evanescene song 'My Immortal' was concerned with this chapter (not to be confused with the infamous Harry Potter fanfic of the same name).**


	13. Chapter 13

Logan padded through the dark corridors of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. He sure as hell wasn't going to sleep any time soon. Not after that. Jean had turned up in his dreams now and then since he'd met her, usually in ways that made him glad it wasn't Scott who could read minds. These last two, tonight and two nights ago… they were different. They creeped him out. They weren't like normal dreams. They were… you believed them. You believed them far too much. And he did not want to live through the jet taking off over Alkali Lake ever again. Once had been enough, too much.

There was a light on in the kitchen. Was that Jones again? Logan stuck his head round the door. Not Jones, Rogue. She was sitting at the counter, chin resting on her hand, an empty mug in front of her. By the smell in here, she'd made herself coco. She jumped when she saw him.

"Logan."

"You too, huh?" He pulled a glass out of the cupboard and poured himself some water. He wasn't even going to bother looking for beer. "Want some?" She shook her head. He sat down at the end of the counter. "So what's eating you, kid?"

She paused. "I had… I had a dream."

There was a silence. "You wanna tell me?" She bit her lip. "You're not gonna give _me_ nightmares, kid."

She took a breath slowly. "I… I saw Doctor Grey." Logan froze, his glass half way to his mouth. That was creepy.

"How… what…" He managed after a moment. "At the lake, or..?"

Rogue shook her head. "No, it was here, but…" She rubbed at her eyes. "It was really weird."

"How?"

Rogue was staring at a point half way up the fridge. "It was like… it was all stuff I remember happening, but…" Rogue blushed and shook her head. "It was like living it again, not just remembering it."

That sounded familiar to Logan. Very familiar. "What stuff?" Logan asked.

Rogue shook her head and looked away. "Just… just normal stuff." She'd gone bright red. Had she had a crush on Jean? Was that what she'd dreamed about? He'd thought… Finding Jean attractive was understandable, but he'd thought Rogue was straight. Maybe she went both ways. It wouldn't have surprised him to find out that Jean had made a few straight girls question themselves. "Just… she was just talking to me." There was a long silence. "Then when I woke up…" Rogue shook her head again. "I'd have sworn she was there in the room. I felt like she was standing there, looking right at me."

"But you were still in your dorm and…"

Rogue nodded. "Everyone else was still asleep, and… and how could she be there? We all saw…" Logan nodded. But he'd felt exactly the same, just for a moment. As definite as the smell of her, but how could it have been real? She'd been dead for ten days. How could her smell be in his room now?

Logan looked at the counter, thinking. There was no way he was discussing his dreams with Rogue, but from what she'd said, hers had a lot in common with his. Probably the best person to ask about any of this stuff was Xavier, but no way was he doing that. No way was he walking up to Xavier and asking. There might be another way.

He looked up at the clock. "I don't have any answers. I don't know enough about… telepathy or whatever the hell this is to have a clue what's going on. If anyone knows, it'll be The Professor. He'll be the one to ask." Rogue looked up at him for a second, then back at the counter. "But right now it's four thirty AM. He won't be up. What do you say we both go back to bed for a couple of hours and go talk to him together before breakfast."

Rogue looked at him. "You don't think I'm crazy, do you?"

"Why would I think that?"

"'Cause I'm seeing dead people. I didn't think I believed in ghosts, but…"

"I don't think you're crazy, kid. But I think you should tell Xavier."

"And you'll come with me?"

"If you want me to." He'd got it. He'd get an answer from Xavier without having to tell Xavier he was having the dreams too. "So what do you recon? Half seven?"

...

"Hey, Phoenix!" Jean looked round. Isaac was walking back towards her, another man on his heels. "This is Troy. He's going to Philadelphia. Does that work for you?"

"Yeah." Jean said. It wasn't exactly right (she didn't know where she was going exactly, but it wasn't Philadelphia), but it was East.

"Okay, cool. Troy, this is Phoenix, she's the hitcher I've had since Portal. She's easy company, she's been helping me revise."

Troy smiled at her. "Where you going to?"

"East."

Troy raised his eyebrows.

"She's also super secretive." Isaac said. "But hey. She doesn't chew gum and stick it under the seat, so I don't care."

"Yeah, we'll be fine." Troy said. "You coming?" He turned as though to walk away. Jean hesitated. She'd have liked another minute to try to read Troy's mind, to check that he didn't mean her any harm, but it was just too noisy here, too many people moving about.

Unless he was an level three mutant or above, she ought to be able to get herself out if she needed to. She'd be okay. She followed him.

He didn't say anything at all until they were out on the freeway, he'd been thinking too hard about the driving and the route until then, but she knew he was curious about her. That was fair enough, she supposed.

"So, Phoenix, where you going to?"

"East." She replied.

Troy glanced at her. She said nothing more. "That kid wasn't joking about secretive. Come on, what am I gonna do? You can tell me."

"I just… who does it help if I tell you? For now, you're going the right way for me, that's enough."

No one said anything for maybe ten minutes.

"You got a boyfriend Phoenix?"

"Yes." If a woman had asked her in the same situation, she might have refused to answer, but to a man… unfortunately, saying 'I'm someone else's woman' still usually worked better than 'I'm not interested'.

Troy tipped his head. "Does he treat you right?"

What did that mean? "Yes." She replied.

"So why's he letting you hitch lifts on your own with strange men? You know what some men are like, it's dangerous for a woman like you to do this stuff on her own. There are plenty of guys around truck stops who are dangerous." He looked across at her. "I mean… not me. I know how to treat a lady right."

Jean looked at him and took a breath slowly. Was he… actually worrying or just socially inept? "I can take care of myself."

"I'm not saying you can't. It's just that truck stops can be dangerous places for a beautiful woman like you and your boyfriend should be looking out for you better than that. I would."

What was she supposed to say to that? "It's a really long story, but if he could help me, he would. For the mean time, I can take care of myself." With any luck, she'd got her message across to the Professor via someone, he'd have started looking for her by now. If she was lucky, they'd come for her today. But in case they hadn't, she would keep heading homewards.

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 **As ever, please review.**


	14. Chapter 14

Rogue got there ahead of him. Logan just hoped that Xavier was up, and not too grouchy before he'd had his breakfast. He struck Logan as the type to be an early riser.

"You okay?" He asked Rogue.

She nodded. "I got a bit more sleep, you?"

"Some." He walked up to Xavier's door and knocked.

"Come." He was up then.

Logan opened the door and stood back to let Rogue in first, but Scott came out before she could. He didn't even look at either of them, just walked off.

The Professor was up – as up as he ever was – and dressed already.

"Rogue, Logan." He said. "To what do I owe the visit?"

"Don't you already know?" Logan asked.

"I make a point of not reading minds unless I'm invited to do so, it feels like eavesdropping."

Rogue shuffled her feet and glanced at Logan. "I… I wanted to talk to you about something."

"Do go on."

"I'm… I saw – I dreamed I saw – Doctor Grey last night."

Xavier put his head in his hand. "Very realistic dreams, remembered events, but relived as though for the first time, though not necessarily in strict chronological sequence, and followed by a very strong feeling of her presence on waking."

Rogue's mouth fell open slightly. "How-"

"You're not the first to complain of it Rogue. In fact, you're the fourth."

"What… What's happening?"

"At a word, Rogue, I don't know. All those who've complained of it so far were on the jet when… My working theory is that it's the result of a telepath dying very suddenly, and while using her powers. She seems to have left an impression of herself on the minds of some of those who were near enough." Xavier looked up at Logan, with that look that always made Logan feel like he was standing naked under a spotlight. He knew. He knew that Logan had been dreaming like that too. Why had he thought he'd be able to get anything past Xavier? He could read minds!

"So is…"

"There's nothing I can do, Rogue, no. At least, nothing I dare attempt."

"That wasn't what…" She said. "When I woke up this morning, I had a word in my head." Xavier tilted his head at her, inviting her to go on. "'Cerebro'."

"Do you know what that word means?" He asked.

Rogue shook her head. "But… I don't know, it feels like it's important, like we need it, we need Cerebro."

Xavier frowned. "Now that's curious. Cerebro is a device I use to amplify my powers, it's how I found you when you ran away."

"Why do you think..?"

Xavier waved his hand to say he didn't know. "Jean used it on one occasion. She risked her life in doing so. Presumably that left a mark on her and that mark… I don't know. All I've said so far is speculation. I'm sure the dreams will fade, the effects of telepaths almost always do, all we can do for the moment is bear it."

Rogue opened her mouth, as though to say something else, but seemed to change her mind.

"Okay." She said after a moment. "At least I'm not going mad."

"Well, if you are, all of us are." Xavier sighed. "Thank you for telling me."

Rogue nodded once and left.

 _Stay._

Logan heard the command in his head as though Xavier had said it aloud. He didn't quite dare disobey. The door closed behind Rogue.

"May I ask how many you've had and when they started?" Xavier said, as though he just expected Logan to understand.

"Thought you said you didn't look without asking."

"I didn't need telepathy, Logan."

Logan shifted his weight. "Two. Last night and three nights ago."

Xavier sighed. "That's about when they started, and that's what I don't understand. Why five days after she died?"

"You're asking me?"

"No, but… why the delay? If it were shock, I'd expect it to start in different people at very different times, not in five of us in two days."

"Who are the others?"

"We two, obviously, Storm and Scott. Rogue is a new addition. I wonder if I should start asking others specifically."

"What's the use?" Xavier looked up at him sharply. "You said you can't do anything about it, so…"

"It's always better to understand." Xavier sighed. "But the Cerebro detail is interesting. You don't recall anything to do with that, do you?"

Logan shrugged. "Don't think so. I dreamed she read my mind, but…" He shrugged again.

"Scott didn't say anything about it either, but I'll ask him directly." Xavier sighed. "The other problem is… the nature of Cerebro. It's a hugely sensitive tool, I don't think I could begin to explain to you the vastness of the information I could gain from it if I were to try hard enough, but where to start? Even if I were to act under the assumption that there is a… sentience of some sort behind Rogue's impression of Cerebro, rather than it just being the spasms of a drowning brain, how on earth would I find it?" Logan had no idea, so kept his mouth shut. The Professor put his hand over his eyes again. "Could I scour the river? Follow the water course all the way to the sea, I suppose I could." He seemed to be talking more to himself than to Logan. "Find the course of the river, work out where the water could have carried her, then where she could have run for shelter… this is going to be a very long process."

He set his wheelchair moving towards the door. Logan opened it for him.

...

"So this boyfriend of yours," Troy said. They'd been driving for a little over an hour. "Is he older? Younger?"

"Younger." She didn't particularly want to talk about herself, or Scott for that matter, but she was a little reluctant to just shut Troy down every time he tried to talk to her. He was doing her a favour.

"Hm. You like 'em young, huh?"

"He's only three years younger." It had felt like enough of a gulf when they'd first started going out, but Scott had always been old for his years.

"Huh, and what's he… what's he like?"

"He's..." Jean hesitated. She wasn't sure what Troy wanted from an answer, she didn't want to make Scott identifiable, she'd rather not talk about him at all, but she probably had to. "dependable and calm and kind. He… he likes to feel that he's helping people, you know?"

Troy nodded. "All sounds very… safe." He had no idea, and Jean wanted to keep it that way. "Do you ever want… excitement? Danger, from him?"

"Not really." They had quite enough of that from the rest of the world.

"So what does he look like? Is he dark? Blond?"

"Dark."

"All the best men are." He winked at her. "And most of the best women. Gotta say, I'm not usually in to redheads." He winked at her again. What was she supposed to make of that? She kept her eyes on the road ahead. Part of her was hoping to see the Blackbird or Scott's bike appear at any moment. She just wanted to get home.

"So what's he in to, your man?"

"Engines." She said, which was true. Easier than remembering lots of lies. "Taking things apart and putting them back together again." She'd had enough of this now, his turn to talk for a bit. "So how about you? Do you have anyone?"

"Nah. The last girl I liked… she's sleeping with someone else now, and he's an asshole."

"How come?"

It wasn't too hard to get him to talk about that. He went on for nearly another hour about the girl who'd turned him down for a man he thought would treat her badly.

"But that's always how it goes down." Troy said, as though in conclusion. "Girls never want the nice guy, they always turn the nice guy down and go off with some asshole or other."

Jean frowned fleetingly. That wasn't her experience at all. She'd more often seen the opposite happen. But she wasn't going to pick a fight about it. Troy seemed to have talked himself in to silence, and that was fine by her.

Jean pushed out with her awareness. She had no idea if she'd be able to detect Cerebro if the Professor was looking for her, but it couldn't hurt to try. But she couldn't remember if The Professor's mind felt different when he was using Cerebro, or just the same but louder.

Troy said something.

She jumped. "What?"

"I asked you when your first time was."

Jean felt her mouth fall open slightly. She wasn't sure whether to laugh or not. "Excuse me?"

He glanced at her. "It's just a joke, Phoenix, a dumb little question you ask people to see how they take it."

"Okay." She said, and looked back out of the window.

"So…" He prompted. He still actually though she was going to answer.

"Ah, no." She shook her head. "That's… personal."

"Come on, who am I going to tell? Your boyfriend?"

"I don't want to discuss it."

"I'll tell you about mine."

"I don't really want to discuss that either."

Troy gave an irritated little huff and shut up. The sooner she was out of his truck the happier she'd be. He was making her uncomfortable now. You just didn't ask something like that of someone you'd only just met.

She really didn't need to panic. Most creeps didn't every try anything, you just had to put up with them, and even if he did, she had ways and means of protecting herself.

She reached out with her mind again, looking for mutants, as she'd been taught to do. She thought that was probably her best chance of noticing if The Professor used Cerebro to look for her. Troy didn't register at all, which meant she was unlikely to have any nasty surprises if she did need to deal with him. The occasional flicker of a mutant's mind passed on the road, but not mutants she knew, not powerful mutants. It was white noise.

She could still feel that beacon drawing her East, as strong as the morning sun. When Troy turned south, it would be time to leave, and not a moment too soon. She'd got used to Isaac. She did not trust Troy at all. There was no way she'd dare sleep next to him, but she'd be long gone by the time night came. He shouldn't have the opportunity to cause her any trouble. He'd have a time card, like the rest of the truckers. They ate, slept and drove. They didn't have time for anything else.

* * *

 **If anyone is interested, Troy's "I'm not usually in to redheads" remark is modelled on a pickup tactic advocated by Roosh V known as 'negging'. It is a form of back-handed compliment intended to make a woman feel that she is undesirable to many or most men, so (in theory at least) more likely to be receptive to any advances that are made because she feels she's lucky to attract any advances at all. Some say it amounts to bullying.**

 **Several other remarks Troy makes are based on remarks made by 'Mens Rights Activists' online.**

 **.**

 **Chapter 15 carries a trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault. My proofreader found it hard to read.**

 **.**

 **As ever, please review.**


	15. Chapter 15: TW - discussion of rape

**This chapter carries a trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault, but it's discussed in such a way that, while it isn't terribly graphic, has the potential to be triggering.**

 **My proofreader found it hard to read.**

 **If you are likely to find it distressing, please skip to chapter 16**

* * *

It felt like nearly an hour before she gave up, she wasn't getting anywhere and her head was starting to hurt. She wasn't used to being able to look that far with telepathy, she wasn't even used to the passive perception she'd been using for days. She didn't know what was happening to her, but for the time being, she seemed to be in control of it. She'd probably be safer to draw her awareness back in slowly, rather than trying to collapse it all at once. She started to draw herself back in, the pain in her head eased slightly almost at once. There was a mutant, just on the edge of her awareness, but a low grade one, and one she didn't know. She continued to pull back, she was almost there, but she glimpsed herself. Her 'avatar', as the Professor called them, someone else's perception, version, of her. Normally, she would have just looked away, but out on her own, vulnerable, it was probably better to know. If Troy was thinking of handing her to the police, she needed to know that.

It was Troy, the avatar was in Troy's head. She focused herself to him.

Almost immediately she pulled back again. Right. He was fantasising about her. Not necessarily a big problem. It was never comfortable to think that someone was imagining having sex with you when you had no interest in having sex with them, but most of the time it didn't escalate. Most of the time it stayed imagination. Was she really going to be threatened by the thoughts of one person, who wasn't even a mutant? If it came down to it, she'd have no trouble beating him. She just had to refuse all food and drink he offered her. Just in case.

Maybe she should try to pour cold water on him, she'd done it a few times. Planting suggestions in people's heads was quite a low-grade telepathic ability, easier than reading. At medical conferences, she'd had a bit of practice at deflecting unwanted attention, a young woman there on her own. It happened. She'd seen a wedding ring on one man and 'reminded' him that he really did love his wife very much, and he could never bear to hurt her like that. She'd suggested to another man that she had HIV, so wasn't worth the risk. That hadn't been so effective, he'd just resolved to use barrier contraception, but fortunately he'd taken a simple 'I don't want to' for an answer. Troy… Troy had said he was single, so there was no sense in reminding him of his loyalty to another woman.

As unpleasant as it was going to be, she reached out for Troy's mind again, trying to keep the connection loose enough that she couldn't see what he was imagining too clearly.

 _She's someone else's girlfriend. She'd say no._

 _Maybe at first._ Troy's mind responded to her prompt as though it had occurred to him of its own accord. _But she'd settle down. Women never know what they want until they get it._

And he went on, imagining her protesting faintly and girlishly as he took her clothes off, while he said that her boyfriend wasn't here, that he didn't need to know.

Jean gritted her teeth. She'd never let him get anywhere near that stage. She'd never let him so much as touch her.

That thought seemed to cross the bridge. Her avatar in his mind suddenly protested more fiercely, tried to grab his hands. He imagined pushing her back on to the ground, he knew she wanted it; she just thought it was hot to pretend that she didn't. And he actually thought that. Almost reflexively, Jean imagined pushing him off; elbows and fists, she'd bite if he got close enough.

That also seemed to cross the bridge. He imagined pushing her back, hard, against the ground and dropping his weight on top of her, pinning her while he carried on taking her clothes off. She'd like it once he was in. She just might struggle a bit on the way there. All women had rape fantasies. This was probably better than anything her safe little boyfriend ever did for her.

Jean pulled back, collapsing her telepathy completely. He was fantasising about raping her. She tipped her head back and swallowed hard to stop herself from retching. She held her breath. The man sitting two feet away from her was fantasising about raping her. The more she resisted, the more he seemed to like it. She forbade herself to gasp. She let the trapped breath go slowly and made herself breathe in again gently. She felt sick. Her mouth had gone dry. Her heart was thundering.

"Calm down." She told herself firmly. "You are still an alpha class telekinetic. You can quite easily prevent this man from hurting you. You just need to calm down a bit and work out a different strategy."

And she needed to keep her telepathy completely dormant for the time being. Knowing it was there was bad enough. She really didn't need to know exactly what he was planning to…

She could just… telekinese him off. She'd offer fair warning, of course, but surely she could just throw him back. But then she risked him calling the police and saying 'this mutant attacked me'. That she didn't want. Could she just fight him? She was a passable hand to hand fighter, not as good as Scott, but she probably had a chance. But not a certainty. If she was losing a physical fight, she could have telekinesis as a backup plan. But what if she got hit in the head? She needed to be in a reasonably good physical state to use her powers effectively. In the time it took her to recover, he might have… Not a risk she was willing to take. She needed another option.

She could remember The Professor talking about something like this once, about seeing a man in a bar menacing a girl, who was clearly very uncomfortable. He'd used telepathy to intervene and nobody had noticed. What had he done? She pressed the heel of her hand to her head. The information she needed was in there somewhere.

He hadn't done anything to how the man perceived the girl, he'd changed how the man perceived himself. He'd made the man think he was homosexual. Did you treat that as planting an idea or grafting an emotion? An emotion? Attraction was closer to an emotion than an idea. So the process was conceive, match, graft, blend. Conceive the emotion or the impulse in yourself, or recall it or fabricate it somehow, find the matching bit in the target's mind, where the graft would fit best, that shouldn't be too hard, he was sitting there fantasising about-

Jean took a deep breath and let it go again. The third step was to graft, to hold to that point and that emotion and bring them together, the fourth was to tidy the edges up.

"Do you wear underwear under that?"

Jean jumped slightly. "What?"

"That looks kind of tight, do you wear underwear under it?" He was trying to inform his-

She couldn't let on. She couldn't let on that she knew. She had to laugh it off. She shook her head and forced a smile. "That is none of your business."

Troy shrugged. "Just asking. We're gonna stop for fuel in about half an hour, I thought we might take a break there and… relax for a bit."

Jean caught a tone in that that she didn't like at all. That was where and when he'd decided to rape her. She needed to act now. She had no idea how long the process would take.

Conceive. She had to form the emotion in herself, the emotion of being attracted to a man. Her first though was of Scott, of the dreams she'd had of him, but that… that was far beyond raw physical attraction now. She loved him, she trusted him, they knew almost everything about each other. That would be harder to graft than… raw chemical attraction, she supposed.

Another man rose in her mind. The dangerous guy. Thickset, haired, and virtually dripping androgen. She remembered the rush through her body when he'd leaned in to kiss her. She blinked. Logan was a better candidate. That was being attracted to a man for his maleness rather than a decade of loving, trusting. That would be much easier to transfer to Troy. She recalled the night at the campsite, after Magneto had saved their lives. She let herself remember the smell of Logan, the depth of his voice, the way his body almost hummed with strength. She almost breathed an apology to Scott. She didn't usually let herself think about other men this way. She had to. If she could use this to stop Troy from raping her... Scott would understand. She pushed Scott out of her mind and went back to Logan, until her heart started to pick up speed again.

Match. Okay, this was going to take a measure of self-control. The relevant parts of his mind ought to be easy enough to find, it would just take a certain amount of courage to look, and not look away. She'd see what was in his head for real if she didn't. She braced herself and pushed out. She saw herself on her back, on the ground, struggling as he held her hands. Nothing she hadn't done before, he thought, she'd probably let that skinny redskin kid have her.

Jean set her jaw and started to push, to graft. Attaching what was in her mind to what was in his, and overwhelming it. The low, soft growl of Logan's voice, the breadth and strength of him, and how she reacted to that, without even wanting to. After a minute or two, the image in Troy's head faltered and faded. She was stronger. She'd done it.

Now blend. Tidying up the edges so Troy couldn't tell where he ended and her graft began. This was the part she was least sure of how to do. She'd never got this, really. She thought it was a matter of looking for places there was dissonance in Troy's mind and trying to smooth it out.

She wasn't completely happy with the result. To her it still felt like a patch stuck on rather than the smooth, moulded graft the Professor had told her to aim for. But she was out of time. Troy was pulling off the freeway, on to a slip road. She had no idea how long the graft would hold.

As soon as the truck stopped, she jumped out, saying that she needed the bathroom. The best she could do now was get out of his sight, and hope that he moved on. He let her run. He didn't chase her.

* * *

 **This chapter (in fact, Troy as a character) exists for one simple reason:  
There is a youtube video titled "Jean Grey using her powers".  
** **Under that video, someone (TypeR23 Jr - no, I haven't sought permission to name this user) commented:  
** **"Not gonna lie she is f****** hot! I wanna rape her so bad in the p****"**

 **My first reaction was shock and outrage.  
How dare anyone talk about any woman like that? You want sexual contact with her, but you specifically want her not to want it, but to overwhelm her and force her in to it. **  
**My second reaction was to think:  
"She's a level 4 telepath/telekinetic. How well do you imagine that's going to end for you?"**

 **Fiction has always been a way for me to figure out the world, and make myself less scared of it. Troy was born of TypeR23 Jr quite casually and publicly stating a desire to rape a woman, and grew up from Project Unbreakable on Tumblr. Almost everything verbal Troy thinks, I found in what rape survivors remembered their rapists saying.**

 **If we want to eliminate this type of behaviour, we must first condemn it.**

 **P.S. I do not by any means intend to say that being gay is a punishment. It's just a relatively easy way for Jean to make him lose interest without anyone being able to tell what she'd done**


	16. Chapter 16

**For anyone who skipped 15:  
** **Jean discovered, not entirely deliberately, that Troy meant to have sex with her, regardless of whether or not she wanted to. She decided that her best option was to use telepathy to convince Troy that he was homosexual and run away as soon as he stopped the truck.  
** **Given that Xavier threatens to make Logan think he's a six year old girl, I don't think it's unrealistic for a telepath to temporarily change someone's sexual orientation.**

* * *

Jean shut herself in a cubicle in the ladies' and sat down, head between her knees, panting. Her head hurt. Grafting was really difficult. Her stomach clenched. She didn't think she'd actually throw up. It was just exertion. And, possibly, being nauseated by what she'd seen in Troy's head.

He was gone. She'd be okay. He was gone and, for the time being at least, he thought he was attracted to men. She had no idea how long the graft would hold. Probably all she'd really done was pass the buck, got him off her and on to someone else. Hopefully whoever he chose next would be bigger than him and know how to fight. Jean swore at him under her breath and put her head in her hands. What did he think gave him the right to…

Now what?

She had to get home, she had to keep moving, she had to get East, but she did not want to go anywhere near Troy again. He was probably still here. With any luck he wouldn't look for her, and if he came to break down the door and drag her out of the ladies' bathroom, she'd expect someone to help her out. So long as she stayed here, she'd be okay. But at some point she'd have to move.

She thought it was well over an hour that she waited; eventually thirst and the desire to get moving again overcame fear. She unlocked her door and poked her head out. Three women, no sign of Troy. She needed water. She didn't care if she looked like a tramp for doing this. She turned the tap of one of the sinks on, cupped her hands and drank from them. She'd had nothing since last night, and only a mouthful to eat. She washed her hands, then her face, as though water could remove what she'd seen. She had to get home.

She took another hand full of water and saw someone turn back to look at her in the mirror. A woman, greying blonde hair, maybe in her late forties.

"Are you okay?"

Jean turned round and reached out for the woman's mind. She didn't immediately see anything worrying. "Ah… actually, I am a little stuck right now." The woman tilted her head at her. Jean took a breath slowly. "I'm trying to get east and my ride…"

"What?"

"He… He left without me."

The woman raised her eyebrows. "Huh. Some friend."

"He wasn't my friend."

"Hitcher?"

"Yeah."

"Well, we're going to New Haven and we have a seat in our car. Is that your way?" Who was we? Jean nodded. "I'll just check with my husband, come on." Jean started to move, and started to reach for the woman's mind again. She was wondering what had happened to Jean, she was concerned, there was music rattling around in there somewhere, the sensation of being in a moving vehicle, even though she wasn't. She wasn't focused. Jean let go. "I'm Rachel, by the way." The woman said, looking back over her shoulder at Jean.

"Jean." She wasn't sure why she'd used her real name, but she didn't think this woman meant her any harm.

"Oh, there's my husband. Phil." She walked up to him. "Phil, this is Jean, I just found her in the ladies'. She's hitching east and she's lost her ride. I thought maybe we could help her out."

Phil nodded. "Sure, if you're going our way."

"New Haven's close enough." Jean said. It frustrated her that she couldn't remember the name of the place she lived, or a phone number, or anything. What had happened to her in the past few days was beyond strange. It was unrealistic to expect to understand it.

Rachel and Phil led her out to the parking lot, she couldn't feel anything immediately worrying in either of their heads, but grafting to Troy had drained her. She didn't have the strength or the focus left to read as carefully as she might have done. She might just have to take a chance with this. A husband and wife pair was probably safer than a lone man.

"So what takes you to New Haven?" She asked, as she took her seat and all three of them reached for seat belts.

"My brother's wife passed away on Monday night." Phil said, as he started the engine.

"I'm sorry."

Phil shook his head. "Yeah. She… well, she was probably just glad it was over, and she's in a better place, but, of course, it's very hard for my brother at the moment."

"Of course."

"So we set out from Chicago this morning, we were lucky, we both managed to get some time off to be with him, help him sort some things out, and of course go to the funeral."

Once they were back on the freeway, Rachel pulled sandwiches out from a bag between her feet.

"Phil ate his before we swapped." She said, by way of an explanation. "That's our plan, swap driving and sleeping and hope we get to New Haven by midnight, or not too long after. Have you had any lunch yet, Jean?"

Jean hesitated. "No, but-"

Rachel turned around and held out a wrapped sandwich to her. "Did your ride have your food when he drove off?"

Jean took the sandwich. "No, I didn't have any, or any money."

"Did you get robbed?" Phil asked.

Jean sighed. "It's a very long story, and I really don't wanna talk about it."

Before long, Rachel settled back against her seat and closed her eyes. Phil seemed content to just drive, he didn't try to talk to her. After a while, Jean tried again to read their minds. Rachel was asleep, there wasn't much to be had from her, Phil was mostly thinking about his grieving brother, he seemed to be praying on and off. Faith changed the way a person's brain was, she could feel that in Phil, like in Kurt. Kurt. She'd forgotten that he was in her head, the heterochrome she and Storm had picked up in a cathedral in Boston, the burn scar on the nape of his neck that had made him attack the President.

Every few hours, they'd stop, switch drivers and carry on. They never stopped for long, whoever wasn't driving would pick at food, then sleep. The whole thing seemed well rehearsed to Jean, these two were used to driving across states together. Even when they spent over an hour completely stationary, they didn't seem at all phased, just voiced sympathy for whoever had had a crash bad enough to shut down the whole road for this long, then gratitude when it was over and they were moving freely again. Phil drove in silence, Rachel played music quietly, it sounded to Jean like southern gospel or something.

As it started to get dark, Jean noticed that the beacon calling her home was closer, much closer, and it was starting to shift to the left as they went East, so North of the line they were driving. But she didn't need to leave these two, not yet. She felt safe with them. The next time they stopped, they gave her a couple of notes and told her to buy herself something to eat.

When the road turned north, that was closer to right, but it had overshot, it was too steeply north. By the time they turned to cross the Hudson River, she knew she was close, very close. Close enough that she could make it on foot, she could feel the bearing of the beacon moving almost minute by minute now. As soon as they'd crossed the Hudson, she spoke up.

"Can you pull over? I'll be okay from here."

"Ah… yeah, just let me get to a turn off or something." Rachel said. "You sure you don't want me to take you to your door?"

"No, it's a tricky route by car, it's easy to walk from here." And she couldn't actually remember where she lived. She just had a bearing, and that bearing was close to due north now.

"You going to be okay walking on your own at this time of night?"

"I know the area pretty well." Jean replied. And this wasn't like being stuck in a confined space with Troy, while he was driving the truck. If she was attacked, telekinesis was an option now.

"Okay, well, safe journey."

"Same to you. And thank you for helping me out."

Rachel shrugged one shoulder. "Whoever welcomes one of these children in my name…" She said it as though the words weren't hers, as though she was quoting something else. Jean could not summon the energy to use telepathy to find out what.

"Here's good."

"Okay, safe journey." Rachel stopped the car.

"And to you, thanks again." Jean got out.

* * *

 **Jean is right, "Whoever welcomes one of these children in my name..." is a quote which appears in three of the four Gospels. Matthew 18:5, Mark 9:37 and Luke 9:48.  
In full, it reads: "Whoever welcomes one of these children in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me, but him who sent me."**

 **As always, please review.**


	17. Chapter 17

So now she was alone. She looked around. It was cool now, it was past midnight. She started to walk, away from the road. There was no point in running. She had a fair distance to cover. Better to keep a steady pace she could sustain.

She left the light and noise of the freeway behind her. She didn't know the route she was taking, she was just following that sense of where home was. If she stopped and found somewhere to sleep, the sense would get stronger when she dreamed, but for now, it was more than strong enough. Better just to keep going.

She tried to keep herself out of sight, her black uniform helped with that. She kept finding herself fighting the urge to run. She wanted so badly to be home. But running would sap her stamina. She'd slept in the car with Phil and Rachel a bit, but not much. She'd not slept well or eaten consistently for days. For the moment, she was coping, but she felt like she was running on adrenaline, and she knew that that could give way horribly quickly. She had to conserve herself. She kept walking.

It wasn't a consistent route, it was just whatever felt direct, along roads, footpaths, between houses and across gardens. Sometimes she had to take long detours around obstacles she couldn't pass. She would get there. It just might take a bit of time.

How would she be received when she got home? They were mourning for her, they'd be overjoyed to see her alive, wouldn't they? But they might not believe she was real. She had to be prepared for that. She might have a hard time convincing them that she was real. If nothing else, her power ought to be able to identify her. Telekinetics were rare and there weren't many mutants who could imitate her with even a hope of convincing people who actually knew her. She might have a hard time convincing them she wasn't Mystique, but Mystique wasn't telekinetic. But a really, really powerful telepath might be able to produce collective hallucinations, like convincing a whole school full of mutants that someone who'd died had come back. But the very fact of being able to suspect that ought to convince the Professor at least that that wasn't what was going on. She'd deal with it when she got there. For now, she just had to get home.

The sky began to lighten. She was so tired. She hadn't eaten or drunk enough. She held on with the same vicious determination that had kept her going through long ER shifts in med school, when you kept going because you had no choice, no way of backing down, so you kept going, far beyond the normal limits of endurance. She would not stop. Not now. She knew she was close.

As the sun began to rise, things started to look familiar. A road sign, or a diner, or a particularly badly decorated house. People were starting to wake. Hopefully she'd be ignored. She was nearly home. She had to keep going.

People started to emerge. She was on her way out of this town. Dog walkers looked across at her, she didn't return their glances, she stepped out of the way of the paperboys.

 _I am nothing to you. Look away and carry on._

And they did. She kept going.

The roads around her started to get busier, she could hear the voices of women snapping at children to hurry up and get ready to leave for school. A group of middle-schoolers waiting for a bus gawked at her, but did no more than that. She was so close. Probably better to stay on the roads now, she was less likely to be challenged than if she was caught creeping through gardens or school fields.

The morning rush started to tail off as she left the town. She was starting to stumble now, she'd walked what she guessed to be about fifteen miles with no food or water, never stopping for more than a minute or two. She was exhausted. But she didn't even need the beacon now. She knew this route so well she could have navigated it blindfolded. And she could sense them. As the town and the press of indistinct human minds faded behind her, another cluster appeared ahead of her, she didn't even have to reach out to hear them. Mutants. Nearly a hundred mutants in close quarters. They were her people. That was her home. She had maybe a mile left to walk. She had to keep going.

She turned off the road up a track without even having to think about it. She saw the wall and the gate rising up before her. She was home. She only had to walk another hundred yards or so. She pushed herself onwards. She didn't have it in her to run now. She could hear activity on the other side of the gate, men's voices, two of them, scuffing on the ground, jumping and starting, they sounded to her as though they were sparring. She reached the gate. She didn't have her key, she'd left it in the jet. She reached out her hand and pushed the gates open a foot by telekinesis. The men on the other side of the gate fell silent. She slipped through the gate and let it close again behind her. She heard two sets of footsteps starting towards her.

Logan and Kurt appeared in front of her. For a long moment, they just stared at her, open mouthed. Then both reacted at once. Kurt whooped and threw himself in to a backflip.

"Und ob ich schon wanderte im finstern Tal, fürchte ich kein Unglück!"

Logan lunged at her, claws bursting from one hand. He grabbed her by the upper arm and touched three claws to her neck. She put her hands up. She would not fight him.

"Show me your stomach." He growled.

"Logan!" Kurt cried.

"She's Mystique. Show me your stomach."

"I'm not Mystique."

"Logan-"

"Jean Grey drowned. I'm damn sure you're Mystique. If you're not, then show me your stomach. And move slow."

She lowered her left hand and unzipped the front of her suit, she really did smell, then pulled up her shirt. Logan let go of her arm, keeping his claws at her throat, and ran his fingers over the top of her abdomen, quite hard.

"Logan-" Kurt repeated.

"Mystique has scars."

"I'm not Mystique." She lifted one hand and focused her power – what little was left of it – on his dog tags. They rose six inches from his chest. Logan snatched them down with one hand. He looked back at her face.

"You drowned."

"I know. I thought I had."

"So what the hell-"

"I don't know. But I'm here. I've been reaching for you for days." Logan's eyes widened slightly. "That's why you've been having those dreams."

"How do you-"

"Because I dream them with you." Logan looked very, very alarmed now. "I was trying to get you to tell the Professor to use Cerebro to look for me for yesterday night," Logan's eyes widened further. "But I don't know if you heard me."

"Who else did you try to give that message to?" He asked.

"Rogue and Scott."

Logan looked down. One of the two had picked up on the message and he'd known about it.

Kurt was looking between them, hands up as though to push them apart.

"Logan, let her go." He said. "She looks ready to fall down. Not all that you do must be in your own strength. If you cannot find a way to be sure, someone else probably can. We must take her to the Professor."

Logan moved his claws away from her neck, but kept them out.

"And, if it means anything to you," Kurt said. "I believe in my heart that she is real."

Logan sighed heavily. "Go get the Professor, I'll bring her in."

Kurt teleported away.

Logan looked at her, as though he thought of saying something, but stopped himself. She didn't have the energy to try to find out what. "Come on." He took her left arm in his left hand and started to steer her towards the main doors. She couldn't see his right hand. She thought it was probably behind her back, ready to drive claws in to her if she proved dangerous.

* * *

 **Kurt's little German interjection translates as "Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." Psalm 23, verse 4.**

 **As ever, please review.**


	18. Chapter 18

**A line with a single dot on it indicates a change of narrator. It is an attempt to preserve my original formatting.**

* * *

Kurt made it in to the atrium in two jumps.

"God almighty, you are wonderful indeed." He breathed as he reached for the door of the first classroom, he thought that one was The Professor's.

No, apparently not. Storm was standing by the blackboard

"Yeah, definitely development of adaptable tactics was – Kurt? Is everything alright?"

She would want to see her too, surely. They had seemed friends to him, she had seemed very sad when she had thought Jean was dead. "Storm, come. Come now, and we must fetch the Professor."

She set down her chalk and hurried across the room towards him. "Stay here." She said to her class. "That's the Professor's room." She pointed across the hall. "What's happening?"

"You will see. You will see. If I say, you will not believe me." Kurt opened the door of the Professor's classroom. Much to his surprise, the Professor was already half way to the door. "Professor!"

"What's the matter?"

"You must come and-" The door opened behind him.

.

Jean opened the door to the atrium of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. She was home, even if she had claws at her back, she was home. Storm was standing, staring at her, just outside her classroom door. Xavier was there too, just staring at her.

"Oh my God." Storm breathed.

Kurt was still murmuring to himself in German, grinning broadly and looking like he was resisting the urge to turn another flip. "Du bist bei mir, dein Stecken und dein Stab trösten mich."

"I don't think she's _Mystique_ -" Logan said from behind her, but the implication was quite clear. He didn't think she was really herself either. Storm seemed rooted to the spot.

"Jean," The Professor said slowly.

 _Come here. Let me read your mind. I need to be sure._

She heard it so clearly he might as well have spoken. Students were starting to poke their heads out from Storm and The Professor's classrooms.

"Let her go, Logan." The Professor said, aloud. "It's alright." Logan obeyed.

Jean started to move towards him.

"Kurt," Storm said softly, somewhere to her left. "go get Scott."

She was home. They were all here. She was home. She'd get to see Scott in a minute. She knelt down in front of The Professor's wheelchair. He laid his hands on the side of her head.

"I'm going to ask you to reach for me." He said. That was safer for him. That allowed him a second to check whether her contact felt like her before he let his defenses down. She raised her hands to the sides of his head and reached out. He only hesitated for a heartbeat before letting her in, but he pushed both their consciousnesses back in to her memories almost at once. He started at Alkali Lake, where she'd taken control of him, checking that their memories matched up, then he pushed back further, she didn't resist him. He went back in great leaps of time, picking out specific moments, years apart, with barely a moment's preparation each time. She had nothing like the control to do that. He was looking for specific moments in which they'd read each others' minds, specific little markers that oughtn't be in anyone else's mind. Then he pulled forwards, to what had happened after Alkali Lake, he was looking for the dreams. He felt her trying to reach for him across the distance, felt the wall he'd put up in her way.

 _Oh Jean, I'm so sorry. I didn't believe you._

 _._

Kurt made it to the door of Scott's classroom in one jump. He opened the door. Scott was standing by the board, drawing a graph.

"-work this out intuitively if-"

"Scott, you must come. Come now."

Scott turned and frowned at him. "I'm teaching. Why?"

Kurt shook his head, he was so close to laughing for joy. "You will not believe me. It is too wonderful. Come. You must see."

Scott was still frowning at him. "Alright." He said slowly. "Who wants to finish taking the class through this, I'll be back as soon as I can." A couple of hands went up. He had no idea. "Bobby, thank you." He set his pen down and followed Kurt to the door.

"Come!"

.

The Professor released her. Jean took a gasp of breath as she came back to herself. Her hands came to rest on the arms of his wheelchair, just until her head stopped spinning. He sighed deeply.

"I am quite sure." He said aloud. "This is Jean Grey. Phoenix indeed." He looked up past her, smiling. Jean got up. The moment both her feet were on the floor, Storm threw her arms around her. Jean hugged her back.

"How?" Storm asked.

"I don't know." There were probably two dozen students looking on now. The quiet hum of their whispering echoed round the hall.

Storm held her tighter. She was home. "I'm so glad." Jean would be more sure of that than she really wanted to be if she wasn't careful. The wall between her mind and the minds of those around her was holding, for now, but it felt dangerously fragile.

Storm let go of her and looked to her left, up the stairs. Jean followed her gaze.

Scott. Scott was standing there, half way up the stairs, Kurt just beside him, his mouth half open in shock.

As soon as their eyes met, he ran at her. She'd barely taken a pace towards him before they collided. Somehow they both ended up kneeling on the floor, arms wrapped round each other. The wall around her consciousness faltered and collapsed. His emotions hit her with more force than his body had. She gasped. The backs of her eyes stung. It wasn't joy. It hurt too much to be joy. It was still like grief. It was everything they'd felt for want of each other, combined and relived and echoed. But she didn't pull away. Neither did he.

She pulled herself back in, raised the barriers of her mind again. They were still kneeling on the floor of the atrium, somehow. They were both crying now.

"Jean."

"Scott." She was home. It was okay now. She was home.

This was so unlike Scott. His displays of affection were usually very private. He didn't often do as much as take her hand in front of students.

"I don't know what to say." He breathed.

"It's okay." She whispered back.

"Don't. Ever. Do that again." He was shaking. She'd seen through Logan's eyes what he'd done in the moments after she'd… died, and felt his grief every time she'd dreamed with him. If she'd known that before, she probably wouldn't have been able to do it. She said nothing for a long moment.

"I love you." She'd probably said it too quietly for anyone else to hear her.

"I love you." He echoed, no more loudly.

"Alright," That was Storm's voice. "first period history, you're dismissed, your homework is to give me a one-and-a-half to two page essay on why the Roman army was so effective for its time."

"First period physics, also dismissed." The Professor said. "Given that the homework is based on concepts I haven't finished teaching you yet, it would be rather unfair to set it."

"Kurt, go dismiss Scott's class." Storm said. Scott said nothing. That was unlike him too. He usually would not let any class go until he said so. He was just too much in shock right now. "Scott," Storm said quietly. "I want to get her to the infirmary."

Scott took a sudden, deep breath, as though to compose himself. "Yeah. Of course." He let go of her, got up, and pulled Jean to her feet. She swayed slightly. She felt very light headed now. She'd lost the adrenaline. She knew she was safe. "Jean, come on." Storm said. Jean took a couple of steps towards her. Scott seemed to notice that she was unsteady and pulled her arm across his shoulders. They were both breathing hard.

* * *

 **Again, Kurt's German interjections are from Psalm 23, the very next verse "You are with me. Your rod and staff comfort me."**

 **Wendy, are you happy now?**


	19. Chapter 19

"Right, Jean, we're a bit stuck in the middle here." Storm said, as soon as they got to the infirmary. Scott sat Jean down on a bed, then sat down next to her and put his hand in hers. "You're the one who should be running this, what do we need to do? Is there a protocol?"

Jean nodded. She'd spent a lot of time writing protocols and algorithms so that, if she was compromised or not there, someone like Storm or Hank could do something useful while they waited for a medic. "I think it's called 'Wanderer' or something."

Storm went for the protocol file and pulled it off the shelf.

"Scott," Jean said quietly, "can you grab me some water." He nodded mutely and got up. The infirmary door opened again behind them. The Professor, Kurt and Logan came in. Storm looked a little bit flustered by this. She was a reasonably good interim medic, but she didn't like having an audience.

"Okay," Storm said, file in hand, "'This protocol is for mutants who have been without reliable access to food, water and shelter for a protracted period of time, but are able to stand, walk and follow simple instructions.' That sounds right." Scott came back with a cup of water.

"Thank you." Jean took it from him and took a sip. She wanted to just down the whole lot, but she knew that wasn't sensible. It might well just come back up if she did.

"It asks for survey bloods." Storm said. Jean pulled one arm out of her suit and offered her arm to Storm, who was putting a needle and syringe together. She raised her own vein, or tried to, her blood pressure was pretty poor.

"Alcohol." She prompted as Storm reached for her arm.

"Sorry."

"So there is alcohol in this place." Logan said quietly.

Jean looked round at him. "Don't even think about it. It'll make you – well, it'd make most people blind." She felt the cold of the spirit, then the sting of the needle. She looked back. Storm was struggling, her blood pressure wasn't good. She pumped her fist a couple of times. "You only need a mil and a half. That'll do." Storm withdrew the needle, Jean put her thumb over the place it had been. "Purple one first, through the lid."

"I know."

There was a moment's silence.

"How sure are you?" Logan asked, looking at the Professor.

"I can't imagine a way I could be more sure." The Professor replied. He was moving himself in to Jean's field of view. "The sense of someone's mind is very difficult to mistake, particularly when it's a mind you know well, and there aren't many minds I know better. This is Jean Grey."

"So why did you say you couldn't find her? You spent three hours looking."

"Logan, I attempted to explain to you yesterday how difficult it is to use Cerebro like that. To my eternal shame, I was looking for an invalid in Western Canada, along the water course from the lake, so I didn't see… where were you last night? Between eight and eleven?"

"Probably Pennsylvania somewhere."

"Which would account for why I didn't find you. I was looking some three thousand miles too far west."

"How did you..?" Storm started to ask.

"Survive that?" Jean asked. She took another sip of water. "I have no idea. It didn't even occur to me that I might."

"Greater love has no man than this." Kurt said softly.

Scott looked as though he thought about saying something, but changed his mind.

"I was actually going to say 'cover the ground.'" Storm said. "It was… ten days ago? How did you cross three thousand miles in ten days with no transport, no money…"

"I hitched." Jean said. "Truckers mostly."

She heard Logan shift behind her. "That was brave." She looked round at him. So did everyone else. He glanced up at the room, then looked back at the floor. "Women on their own around truck stops, they… they sometimes have a target painted on their backs. Stuff can happen that…" Jean felt herself tense. He tailed off. "'S why I picked Rogue up. I figured if I didn't, someone else would. And not everyone that hangs around truck stops would remember that she was a kid." He shifted. "Didn't know then what would happen to anyone who tried it."

Jean stayed silent. She wasn't sure she wanted to keep what had happened with Troy a secret from everyone forever, but she certainly didn't want to tell all five of these people at once, probably never Kurt or Logan, even if she didn't think any of them would blame her. She didn't want to see them look at her like that. Like she was damaged. Nothing had happened to her. Not really.

But they were looking at her for an answer. "I was okay." She said. The Professor seemed to sense at once that she was keeping something back. She felt his mind brush against hers.

 _Jean, what happened?_

She pushed him away. If he used his full strength, she wouldn't be able to resist him, not when she was this tired, but he pulled away.

Logan huffed quietly. "I guess if you can hold back a floodwater and pick up a jet, how hard can it be to get an asshole to leave you alone?"

Jean smiled fleetingly. "I heard some interesting rumors." She said, turning to look at Logan. "About a cage fighter called The Wolverine who can't be killed and always wins, no matter how hard you hit him." Everyone was looking at Logan now. Good.

Logan shrugged. "How I made my money." He said. "Fight in one place until I got the money together for the gas to move on."

Jean heard Storm swallow a curse. "How long did you live like that for?"

Logan shrugged again. "Does it matter?"

"I know the feeling." Kurt said softly. "To have run, but have nowhere to run to, I do not think that there can be a thing so lonely as to be a waif." Logan looked away.

There was a long silence.

"Storm," Jean said after a minute or two. "I'm going to shower while we're waiting for bloods."

"There's one down here, right?"

"Yeah, through there."

"Okay, but I'm gonna stay close, you look like you're going to faint."

"I'm fine." It was a false assurance. She got up. Her head spun for a second, but even the small cup of water Scott had given her seemed to be helping.

Scott got up too. "I'll get you stuff to change in to."

"Thanks."

He walked out. Kurt followed him. Logan looked as though he thought about following, but didn't.

Storm followed her almost in to the shower. She cut the elastic band from Jean's ponytail, rather than pulling it, and together they teased the worst of the knots out with their fingers, Jean flinching now and then. Her hair almost stayed in place without the band, it was so dirty.

"Yeah, you do smell." Storm said, as Jean started to get out of her suit.

"Thanks."

Storm smiled. "Look, I… I don't know how on earth you survived that, and to be honest, I don't care right now. I'm just… so glad I've got my best friend back." Jean smiled back at Storm and reached to hug her. She'd missed Storm. Storm had been one of the girls she'd taken under her wing as a teenager. Storm raised a hand to fend her off. "No. You really smell. Get in the shower."

Storm turned her back on Jean, but stayed close by.

When Jean had finished, Storm handed her a towel, without looking round. Jean looked down at it. It wasn't one of the infirmary ones that she'd been expecting. It was one from Staff Quarters upstairs. There was a neat pile of clothes on the side for her, just a gray uniform hoodie and slacks, but with her underwear underneath. Like she might have chosen to wear for training, her most comfortable ones. Her deodorant was there too.

She started to form some sort of question.

"Yeah, that was all Scott." Storm said. "He brought you that too." She pointed to a small white pouch sitting beside where the clothes had been. Her nail kit. Scott knew she never let her nails get long, med school did that to you. "I don't think he'd got around to getting rid of any of your stuff yet. I don't think he could face it."

"Good." Jean said. Easier to be glib than to talk about how hard Scott had taken losing her. She started toweling her hair again.

Storm didn't smile back. "Did you… did you have any control over when..?"

"No. I just made for home as fast as I could as soon as I woke up."

"When did you wake up?"

"Four days ago? Five? Can you grab me some more water?"

* * *

 **Kurt's quote ("greater love has no man than this") is again Biblical, John's Gospel, chapter 15, verse 13.**


	20. Chapter 20

The infirmary was more or less as Jean had left it. Only Kurt had left, and Scott was standing. Logan and The Professor hadn't moved.

She held up the nail kit to Scott. "Thanks."

Scott shrugged one shoulder. "I thought you'd want it." He'd got himself back under control. To someone who didn't know him, he would have looked calm. That was the way with Scott. He'd show very little emotion, or none at all, then suddenly lose his grip. They'd have it out together at some point, but only when they were alone. For now, he'd keep a brave face on. "The machine beeped, by the way." He nodded at the blood analyzer. Jean looked across at it. She got the impression that The Professor had something else to say, but was willing to wait. The machine had finished with her blood, Storm came and looked over her shoulder.

"Is that..?" Storm asked.

Jean shook her head. "I haven't had enough to drink for a day or so, that'll push PCV and TS up, and Urea and Createnine. If I keep drinking water at a sensible rate, they'll settle down. That's from walking all night with no food, that's… I must have done some sort of regeneration cycle."

"I didn't know you could do that." Storm said.

"Neither did I." Jean replied. "But I should have died half a dozen times over and there's not a mark on me, and it might arguably be a Morgan's response as well."

"What?" Logan said.

"Morgan's response." Scott replied. "Some mutants, if they take a lot of damage, go in to a coma, rather than just blacking out for a minute like a human would, and try to repair themselves. Named after a guy called Andrew Morgan."

"You do it." Jean said to Logan. "It would explain how I spent five days under water and survived." She took another mouthful of water and scrolled down the results page. Quite a few things weren't within 'normal limits', but there was nothing particularly unexpected given hunger, thirst and stress.

"You hungry?" Scott asked as she turned away from the machine. Which one of them was supposed to be the telepath? She nodded. "I'll go see what I can find." That was how he was coping for the moment, keeping himself moving, keeping himself busy.

"Jean," The Professor said, "may I read your mind again? I feel that there's a good deal I could understand better if…" Jean nodded and sat down on the bed. He positioned his wheelchair directly in front of her. "As ever, if you want me to stop or move on-" She nodded. She knew the rules. She leant forward and reached for him, he brushed her wet hair off her temples with his fingers. "Jean, relax. You're resisting."

And she was there, standing beside Alkali lake, holding back the water with one hand, lifting the jet with the other, restraining Kurt too.

 _Now this is odd._ The Professor's avatar appeared beside her, standing, walking. His avatar always did. _The power required to do this… I know you've been growing a little over the past few months, but this is out of all proportion. This is the power of a level five mutant._

 _I don't think I'm still capable of this now. I don't know why I was then._

 _Possibly not. Extreme fear, anger… What I really wonder at-_

Water hit her. Blinding force. Blinding cold. She was thrown back. There was no breath in her. She was spinning with the force of the water. She hit the ground and was borne up again. Her chest was full of water. She coughed, but she was coughing in to water. When she gasped, there was only water for her to draw. Her chest burned along with the spinning. It was over. There was no point in fighting. She was drowning. She'd done it. It was over. Her ears were ringing, she had no idea which way was up any more. She couldn't even scream. She choked against the water. She was fading. She was drowning.

Then nothing.

Jean gasped and pulled back from the Professor. She nearly fell off the bed on to him. She felt an arm around her middle.

"Hey, you're alright." She was coughing. She wasn't drowning. She was in the infirmary. "Just breathe." The voice behind her said. "Just breathe, you're okay." Logan's voice. The Professor was breathing hard too.

Jean coughed hard. "I'm okay."

"You don't look it."

"I'm sorry, Jean." The Professor said.

"I don't think you're going to get to anything useful through that." She said.

"No. Will you let me try again from the other side?"

Jean pushed Logan's arm away, took a mouthful of water, and settled herself back where she had been.

"Do you have to do this right now?" Logan asked. "Let her rest."

"It's fine." Jean said. The Professor needed to do this. He needed to understand. So did she. She wanted to know what was happening to her. This was probably her best chance of doing that.

Her head broke the surface of the water. She gasped. Power rose inside her. Water surged up out of her lungs so that for a moment, she felt like she was drowning. Then she took a breath. Her body flared in to life. She was cold. She was wet. Her clothes were heavy with water. She looked around. The sky was bright gold in behind her, darker in front.

She could feel the Professor trying to reach backwards, a skill she'd always struggled with, he could generally do it without too much effort, but he was struggling, really struggling.

 _I can't find it._ He said. _I can't find what came before. What became of you in those five days?_

 _Ischaemia._ Jean replied. _I might not have been forming memory._

He carried her forwards, jumping and starting as memories looked at like this always did, to the first lift she'd hitched, he was looking for the dreams, to that first, passing touch of his mind on hers by the side of the road that turned her South. He felt Scott wake after the first dream.

 _Oh good God. It… small wonder he…_

Jean went after the detail but he held it back from her.

 _That's not mine to disclose._

 _I don't think this is mine to disclose either._

 _We're spying on Scott rather, aren't we?_

 _Yes._

The Professor moved on. He flicked over her dream of Logan, but looked at her dreams of him in minute detail.

 _They match._ He concluded. _Co-dreaming has been reported in those who spend a lot of time asleep near powerful telepaths, but these are memories, not true dreams. If you don't mind my asking, does this ever happen to you and Scott?_

 _Never. Not before this._

He went on, not looking very closely at anything. She pushed him away from some of her dreams, particularly the ones with Scott, they were private, and he didn't try to push past her. She could feel him examining, theorizing, working his way through the dreams she was willing to show him, trying to work out exactly what they were and how they worked. He flinched from Logan's memories of the moments after she'd… 'died'. So had she.

 _So you tried to impress Cerebro up on three people. That was well done._

 _It didn't work though, did it?_

 _The fault in that was more mine than yours._

He moved on chronologically. He felt her flinch at Troy. The memory of what he'd imagined came up in her like bile. She pushed it back.

 _Jean, what did he do?_

 _Nothing._

But he knew her too well. He could see, feel, how Troy had made her feel.

 _Jean,_

 _He thought…_ She recalled it. How the more strongly she'd suggested she'd resist, the more violently he'd imagined it. How certain he'd been that she'd wanted his advances, that she would have enjoyed them if she had let him have his way.

She felt the Professor's revulsion.

 _Pitiable creature. What did you do?_

 _What you taught me. Conceive, match, graft, blend._

And he saw. The Professor saw the graft, who she'd used and how, and the result. She felt his amusement.

 _That was well executed, all things considered._

 _How long do you think…_

 _He'll be firmly attracted to men? Maybe a week, at most. But grafts don't come off all in one piece. He'll be very confused a good deal longer than that._

 _Hopefully that'll keep him from…_

 _Hopefully._

The Professor followed her in to Phil and Rachel's car, then across country on foot for miles.

 _So your telepathy guided you home, without ever telling you clearly where you were going, just with a bearing._

 _Yes._

 _I'm amazed you picked up anything at all at a distance of three thousand miles._

 _The first thing I picked up was you._

 _Never the less, you're powerful now, Jean. How much more powerful I can't say, but there's been some change in you._

He let go of her. She came rushing back to herself and looked around. Scott had come back, Logan and Storm were still there.

"I'll take my leave now." The Professor said. "Morning Recess is only ten minutes away, and I should probably teach my third and fourth classes if I can." Scott sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "You don't have to, Scott, nor you, Storm. In fact, I'd like someone to remain with Jean if possible."

.

Storm came back down to the infirmary about half way through the lunch hour. She'd taught – well, tried to teach – her third and fourth classes, but most of the hands raised in both sessions had been to ask about Jean, not The Great Depression or Napoleon's defeat in the winter of 1812. Kitty had come down with her, between them, they were carrying food for Scott and Jean and a stack of essays for Storm to mark.

"Okay, thanks Kitty, I'll be okay from here."

"Okay." Kitty put what she was carrying down and jogged off towards the elevator again.

Storm stood up tall and looked through the glass at the top of the infirmary door before she went in. Jean and Scott were lying on one of the beds, Scott was still half on his chair, both of them fast asleep. One of Scott's arms was lying across Jean, one of Jean's arms had disappeared under Scott.

"Aw." Storm said quietly.

She almost felt bad for disturbing them, but Jean needed to eat. She picked the food up again and backed in to the room, then set the food down and went over to them. "Scott." She laid a hand on his arm.

"What?" He slurred, lifting his head. Jean stirred too. Scott shook his head. "I fall asleep?"

"Yes. Definitely."

He shook his head again, sitting up. "Sorry."

Storm smiled. "I think we'll let you off."

Jean half sat up too. "What's going on?"

"Nothing." Storm said. "I just brought you lunch. And I came to ask you how you'd feel about teaching fifth period, Scott. I've got a free, I can stay here."

"How many have I already missed?" Scott asked.

"Four. Or three and a most of."

He made a soft, frustrated noise in his throat and stretched. "I probably should then, shouldn't I?"

"Probably. But be warned, they'll want to talk about Jean, not geometry." Scott smiled. "My strategy was to say they could have five minutes to ask about that at the end of the class, so long as they stayed on topic until then."

"Did it work?" Jean asked.

"Yes." Storm replied. "I think the Professor's going to tell everyone the basics over dinner to try and stop the rumor mill from getting too crazy."

Jean smiled. "That's probably smart."

* * *

 **If anybody is interested, here is an explanation for Jean's blood results:**

 **PCV means 'packed cell volume' per mil of blood, TS means 'total solids' (also called total protein) per mil of blood. Blood has three main types of component: cells, protein and water. If the body is deficient in one, the other two will take up a greater proportion of the blood. Jean is dehydrated, so her blood water content is low, so logically her blood must have a greater proportion of cells and protein per mil to take up the space.  
**

 **Urea and Createnine are both markers of kidney function. Jean is dehydrated, so her body is trying to preserve water. A major way of doing this is to slow kidney function down, a lot. Urea and Createnine are usually removed by the kidney, so while dropping kidney function does preserve water, it also makes urea and createnine build up.**

 **On an unrelated note, Napoleon's defeat in the winter of 1812 refers to Napoleon's disastrous attempt to invade Russia in the winter, which history has proven to be impossible many times... except for the Mongols.**


	21. Chapter 21

**This chapter is very long. There was simply no sensible place to break it. Tomorrow's will be very short.**

 **I should also say there's mild sexual content in this chapter, but there's nothing explicit at all and it's entirely consensual.**

* * *

In the end, Jean didn't go to the main dining hall for dinner. She, Scott and Storm ate downstairs, she didn't quite feel ready to have that many people staring at her.

"Is it worth taking bloods again, do you think?" Storm said as they finished eating. "Just to make sure everything's…"

"The leukogram won't have gone completely yet." Jean said. "But we should probably check everything else."

"I'll take plates up while you do that then." Scott offered, getting up.

"Thanks." Storm said. "And Scott," He turned back to look at her. "I changed the board so it's my night tonight, not yours."

He looked down. "Thanks. I'll swap out with you for something else."

"No, don't worry about it. I think you could both use the sleep."

"Thanks." Scott said. "But I will pay you back in kind."

.

The Professor came down about half an hour later, just after Jean's bloods had come back clean (apart from the stress leukogram, which she hadn't expected to be gone). Kurt followed him down and stood by the infirmary door uncertainly, as though he thought he might be sent out.

"I shan't keep you long." The Professor said. "But I feel we need to settle this. Can anyone think of a compelling reason to confine Jean to the infirmary?"

No one said anything for a minute.

"There's an 'isolate if' protocol." Storm said. "She doesn't fit any of the criteria for that."

"Jean, do you feel that you're adequately in control of your powers?"

"Yes." She did. She hadn't made anything shake or made any lights flicker since she'd got back. The only involuntary stuff that had happened to her since the lake had been the dreams, and even they hadn't happened when she'd fallen asleep today, even though Scott had fallen asleep with his head inches from hers.

"In that case, I think we ought to release you, and I advise you to go to bed."

Jean smiled. "I think I'll take that advice." She was so tired. Even though she'd slept a few hours in the day, she was tired. But that wasn't all she wanted at the moment. She'd get to that. That wasn't just dependent on her.

"That said, I'd like to keep someone near you, just in case anything…"

That didn't even require an answer. Scott had hardly let go of her since she'd come back. He was sitting next to her even now, his hand in hers. The Professor looked at him and met his eye, then nodded.

"I'll bid you all goodnight then." He turned and started for the door, which Kurt went to open for him. "And if anyone comes up with a sensible explanation for how someone who can't breathe under water and has no known regenerative capacity managed to survive five days in a lake with no ill effects, I'd be very interested to hear it." He finished, over his shoulder, smiling.

Jean smiled. She didn't have any theories. Scott let go of her hand, put his hand on her shoulder and kissed the side of her head.

"You have no idea, do you?"

She shook her head. "Not a clue. I should be dead from three or four different things but…"

"You're impossible, you know that?"

"This from the guy who shoots lasers out of his eyes."

Scott laughed softly. "Touché." He paused. "Are you tired enough to go straight to bed or…"

"Certainly to start heading that way." She got up. He followed her, taking her hand. This was so unlike him. He seemed to be afraid that if he let go of her, she'd disappear again. That was fair enough, she supposed.

Without really deciding to, she reached out for his mind. He was unfocused, bits of the day were flicking through his mind, and bits of the past ten days, bits of the dreams, bits of his grief, once or twice a flicker of the base under Alkali Lake, where Stryker had made him attack her. That hurt him, every time he recalled it. And underneath it all-

 _"Get a hold of yourself. She's been back all of ten hours, she's exhausted. She's not going to be the least bit interested."_

Interesting. In spite of the nature of some of the dreams they'd shared… Jean suppressed a smile. He was right though, she was tired, and they'd have things to say to each other once they were alone and unlikely to be disturbed. Anything else could wait a while.

Their room was almost exactly as she'd left it, down to the journals piled up by her side of the bed.

"You hadn't started-"

"No." He closed the door behind them. "No, I… couldn't." He was still looking at the door handle. "I wasn't ready. All your stuff is still…"

Jean walked over to the foot of their bed and sat down. "Maybe some part of you knew, somehow."

"I doubt it." He sat down beside her. "I think if I'd even suspected you could be alive I wouldn't have felt…" He tailed off. She knew. She'd felt it. Every time she'd dreamed with him.

She pulled him in to her arms. He held her back, just as firmly. "It's okay." She breathed. "It's okay, it's over." The backs of her eyes were prickling again.

Scott took a gasp of breath, pushing against her embrace, and let it go again. "Who's supposed to be comforting who?"

"It can go both ways." She said. "And I think we're both allowed to cry."

He gave a soft cough that might have been trying to be a laugh.

"Why did you do it?" He asked after a minute.

"We would all have died." She said. "You, me, the Professor, Storm, Kurt, Logan and half a dozen of the children. That's hardly a choice."

"You didn't know how bad the jet was, I was going to try to fix it."

"Would you have made it?"

"No, it… There was a hole in the fuel line to the verticals, we were lucky the whole thing didn't blow up."

"How did..?"

"Magneto." His voice was almost shaking with anger. "Or one of his… John had some idea how the jet worked, he was interested, so I was showing him bits. John went with Magneto, he must have shown him how to sabotage the jet."

Jean hissed softly. "If it had just been us, just X-men… Arthur's thirteen."

"Mutant child's a weapon to Magneto. Nothing else. Think about how he used Rogue…"

"Yeah."

He took another gasp of breath. "It feels like… It feels like whichever side, whether they're trying to wipe us out or wipe humans out, either way, we're just weapons. Just things to be used."

She felt a sharp spike of pain from him, pain and shame. She held him tighter. Her hand found a raw little circular mark on the nape of his neck, half healed. He hissed as though in pain, then flinched and grabbed at her hand, pulling back from her.

"Don't."

He was breathing harder now. Then it occurred to her where she'd seen a mark like that before. Kurt, when they'd first found him, had had one.

"Scott-"

"Don't."

"Scott, what did he do to you?" Scott was sitting straight now, his hands clenching the bedclothes by his sides, jaw set, eyes down.

"I tried to kill you."

"Scott-"

"And I think I did the damage to the dam. If I hadn't done that, the-"

"Scott, Stryker nearly succeeded in making the Professor kill every mutant on the planet. He has had a really, really long time to get good at abusing us." Scott sunk further. She put her arm around him again. He didn't shrink away. "Will you show me?"

For a moment, he didn't move or speak, then he shifted to face her, straightening up, looking at her now. Tentatively, she raised her hands to his head. He put his on her shoulders. There was no reason for that other than habit. She reached for him.

Noise, the flickering distress and relief that were coloring everything in here at the moment, then it became clear what he was trying to lead her to.

 _Kneeling on a concrete floor, hands cuffed behind his back, then those cuffs tied to the floor and to the ceiling, he was immobilized. There was a blindfold over his visor too. His knees hurt, his shoulders hurt, his back hurt. He'd tried to move a few times, but it had earned him a hard kick in the ribs each time. So now he was just waiting. If they'd been going to kill him, whoever 'they' were, they'd probably have done it already._

 _He heard a metal door clang open. He resisted the urge to look up, he wouldn't have been able to see anything anyway. Then a man's voice._

 _"_ _Has he struggled much?"_

 _"_ _No, he gave up pretty quick."_

 _"_ _Also suggests he's not freakishly strong or anything, maybe it is just his eyes. Okay, let's give this a go." Give what a go? Scott felt his breathing pick up speed. "Now remember, this male is very destructive, but not that resilient, so far as we can tell."_

 _"_ _I am a man," Scott said, fighting to keep his voice level. "not an animal. I have a name and a-" Someone kicked him in the ribs, hard._

 _"_ _Do not go anywhere near that visor, but I need his head restrained."_

 _What were they going to do to him? Maybe there'd be a right time to struggle. Someone grabbed a fistful of hair on the top of his head. He pulled down, gasping in pain._

 _"That's just as easy." Someone put a knee on his back, his head was being pulled out forwards, he was hissing breaths, between pain and fear. What were they going to do to him?_

 _Something stung and burned at the back of his neck. He shrunk towards the floor as though he could duck away from it, but it seemed to sink deeper, through his skin. A wave of pain, like a bashed elbow, ran down his back. He twitched and gasped, then a sharp, knifing pain seemed to go straight through his head. Then it passed._

 _"_ _Sit up." The man's voice said. The hand had let go of his hair, he didn't see any reason why he shouldn't. He straightened his back. "Okay, seems good, take him off the chains." Something behind him clicked. "Now get up." Scott got to his feet, without considering why. "Turn around." Again, he just did it. Why did this not matter to him? Why was he just doing as he was told? "And back again." Before he'd even paused to think, he found himself doing as the voice said._

 _"_ _I'd say he's converted." A different man said._

 _"_ _Well, it's always worth being sure with these powerful ones. Take the cuffs off him." Scott should have freed his eyes, hit out, done something. But for some reason, he didn't. He just couldn't summon the will. His hands fell to his sides as they were freed. Someone took the blindfold off him. He was still wearing the visor. Around him were four armed men and a woman, the same woman he'd fought at Magneto's prison. "Right, you have work to do. There are mutant intruders in the base. Go find them. Kill any uncontained mutant you see, except her," He indicated the woman. "and give no warning. They're in the West second corridor, close to the dam. That way. Go."_

 _And he went. He'd been let go. He should just run, find the Professor and run. But he had work to do. He had to find the intruders. What? No he didn't. He didn't belong to that guy, he'd been holding him hostage. He'd probably do better to team up with the 'mutant intruders' than attack them. Either way he had to find them first. He sped up._

 _There they were, three of them. A heterochrome and – Jean, that was Jean. He raised a hand to his visor and – No! Stop! No! What are you doing! That's Jean!_

 _The beam shot out from his eyes. She'd seen him coming, he hadn't landed a hit. Thank God. What the hell had he done that for?_

 _She shouted an order to the other two, Magneto and Mystique? What were they doing together? What the hell was going on? What the hell was wrong with him? He took another shot at where he thought she was. Thankfully he was wrong. He'd only have to hit her once. He had to stop this. He had to stop this now. But he couldn't. He couldn't make himself stop trying to kill her._

Jean pulled back. She didn't need to see this. She knew. She didn't disengage all at once, that tended to be very uncomfortable. So she still felt Scott being thrown backwards by her power, things sped up, the blast from Scott she'd taken head on, then the blow she'd landed him and the damage that had done to the cavern.

She pulled back completely. Both of them were panting.

"Stryker." She said, settling her hands on his shoulders. "All on Stryker. You were not responsible for that." He said nothing. She laid her hands on the sides of his neck and pressed her forehead to his. "Hey. You would never hurt me. You'd never hurt any of us. That wasn't you."

"Sure as hell felt like me."

"You don't… you're not as familiar with the way the mind works as I am." She pulled back slightly, so she could see his face. "I've been in more people's heads. I've had the Professor control me so he could teach me to resist control, that's what it feels like, like you're a spectator in your own body. It's terrifying. And it's what Kurt remembered. He managed to get the effect of a really powerful telepath doing their worst in to whatever that fluid was, and-"

"It's Cerebrospinal fluid."

"What?"

"It's the cerebrospinal fluid of another telepath, one he'd…" Scott shifted, so they were sitting side by side, arms round each others waists, again. "the word the Professor used was 'subsumed'."

Jean felt her mouth fall slightly open. That was disgusting. "How? I mean, how do you get CSF to carry power like that? And who does it bond you… who does it make you obey?"

Scott shook his head. "Apparently Stryker. I don't know. You'd have to ask The Professor. I've spent a lot of the last… trying not to think about it."

Jean nodded. "Okay."

Scott took a breath. "So what… happened to you? After you came out of the lake, you said you hitched but…"

So she told him. She told him about Jayden and Lars and Marie and Isaac, falling asleep to Lars's awful music, helping Isaac revise – apparently she couldn't stop being a teacher just because she fell in a lake. He'd asked her the question to distract himself from what Stryker had done to him. He wanted comfort. She gave him that. She didn't mention Troy other than to say that he hadn't been talkative, which was true, and she didn't mention the other guys by the fire in Kamloops. She didn't want to load him with her fear, her pain, not right now. He had enough to deal with.

"-and found myself face to face with Logan with three sharp spikes pointed at my neck. He thought I was Mystique or something."

"That's…" Scott tilted his head. "That's not entirely unreasonable."

"I know, but… It was the last thing I needed. I was just so tired."

"At least he didn't actually stab you." Scott said after a moment.

"I guess. Anyway, you know the rest. I'm home."

"Yeah." He put his second arm around her and pulled her closer. "You're home." He kissed the side of her head. She kissed him an inch below the ear, that was just where she'd ended up.

They stayed like that for several minutes. After a while, something that had gone quiet in Jean began to reassert itself, to remind her that she could just ask him. The worst he could do was say no, and she wouldn't be any worse off if he did. And she knew he was interested, she'd heard him reining it in in himself earlier.

"Scott," He drew back slightly so he could see her. She drew back in return and straightened up. "I want you to take me."

He didn't move for a second, he clearly hadn't been expecting that. "You… You serious?"

"Do you think I'd mess you about like that?"

"No, but… I thought you'd want to get some rest."

"It's early yet." She glanced at the clock. "Not even nine. If you don't want to-"

"Did you see what I dreamed… was it three nights ago?" Jean nodded. She thought she knew what he was talking about. "Of course I want to, I just didn't think you did."

"So if you want to and I want to…" She looked up at him, tilting her head, exposing her neck. She settled one hand on his arm. Then he moved. The arm around her waist came up towards her shoulders, he put his other hand on the side of her neck and kissed her. She was home. She was safe.

"Anything specific?" He asked as they broke apart.

She leant forward and touched her mouth to the skin just below his ear. "Just… be gentle with me." This would be nothing like what she'd seen in Troy's head, she didn't think Scott was capable of behaving like that, but she didn't want to recall that. Not even for a moment.

He brushed her neck with his lips. "Okay. I think I can do that."

She let herself get lost in him, in the familiar lines and movements of his body. She was home, she was safe.

It wasn't until she reached for his belt that she stopped herself. She should have thought of this earlier.

"Scott, condom."

"Sorry, what?" He looked back at her face.

"Condom please. I've had some sort of regeneration cycle, I don't want to assume that this is working." She pulled at the skin over her progesterone implant and felt it slip between her fingers.

Scott nodded. "Yeah, of course. I think I've got a couple. Hang on."

* * *

 **I apologise if the contraception remarks bother you. My medic-brain kicked in and wondered if a regeneration cycle would mess up non-barrier contraception, then decided that that would occur to Jean, who would do something about it.**

 **As ever, please review.**


	22. Chapter 22

"How's Jean?" Charles heard Storm ask as he came in to the staff room for morning briefing, the door had been left open for him.

"I think she's okay." Scott said, pulling a stack of papers off a shelf. "She's still asleep, I didn't want to wake her."

"Did anybody have those hyper-realistic dreams last night?" Charles asked, as his wheelchair bumped over the threshold. Nobody spoke up. "Good. I'll check with Rogue and Logan, when I find him."

"Where is Logan?" Storm asked. "I haven't seen him since midday yesterday."

"He isn't far away." Charles said. "I looked for him earlier. But I have to say this to both of you before the day staff arrive:" Scott and Storm turned to face him. Charles drew a breath slowly. "What has happened to Jean defies all explanation. She should not have had the capacity to do what she did, nor to survive what followed. For all we understand this, she might as well be a newly-manifesting teenager. She has a woman's maturity and self-awareness, that's to our favor, but we must be prepared for further change, and change she may struggle to control."

"I don't think she's-" Scott started.

"At the moment, neither do I." Charles said. "But it may be dangerous to assume she won't lose control, wholly or partly. We must be vigilant."

Footsteps on the stairs. The day staff were coming.

* * *

 **Fin**

 **There will be an epilogue in a minute.**

 **There will be a sequel... at some point.**

 **Thanks to Marvel Comics for creating this world, to God for creating ours and yet coming in humility to save us while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8), and to MrMashyman for proofreading all of this enormity of a fic (go and check out his sherlock fic).**

 **As ever, please review**


	23. Epilogue

**How Jean survived**

 **Warning:** Very dodgy biology ahead. Keep in low gear.

 **Drowning:** A pathologist will tell you that those that drown don't die of having water in their lungs, they die of being unable to get oxygen to their brain, owing to the water in their lungs. This is where the Morgan's response comes in. The Morgan's response is my own invention, but it's based on what Mystique and Logan seem to do when injured. When stabbed three times through the stomach and diaphragm, a normal creature would not just pass out immediately, they'd lie gasping and screaming until they blacked out, then they'd die. Mystique is clearly showing some sort of adaptive response, I've developed it to a 'Morgan's response'. Logan shows a very similar thing, both when he's attacked by Sabretooth at the start of X1, and when he gives his power to Rogue at the end of X1, so it's clearly not just Mystique. The purpose of the Morgan's response is to focus resources to deal with severe damage, by shutting down non-vital functions. In Jean's case, by entering a coma-like state, she was able to run off her body's stored oxygen (we all store oxygen to some extent, just not enough to run for five days, even in a coma). It's also possible she used telekinesis to create a barrier somewhere down her respiratory tract to keep the water out (Professor X suggests as much in Last Stand, but I'm broadly ignoring Last Stand).

 **Hypothermia:** Being in cold water for five days ought to kill anyone. The get-out card I'm using here is the Morgan's response again. It's feasible (just) that the Morgan's response drops the body temperature so she can tolerate being much colder, and so little of her body is functioning that actually, as long as her blood stays reasonably fluid, it matters much less. The problem also arises once she's awake and walking through the woods, wearing wet clothes and with no food, at night. Here, she actually does start to show signs of hypothermia, but she's moving, which helps her keep a bit warmer, and Jayden picks her up before it gets too severe.

 **Pneumonia:** As Jean suggested way back, the water from the lake isn't clean, so taking a load of it in to your lungs will give you pneumonia. Telekinesis gets us out of that one. When she used telekinesis to push the water out of herself, she did it so thoroughly that she removed all the lake bugs too, so there's nothing down there to give her pneumonia. Science!


End file.
